PROVIDENCE, R.I.—Tristan Keyser-Parker, a senior at Brown University, was in a workshop inside the school’s Barus & Holley engineering building Saturday afternoon when he heard someone yell “Intruder!”
Keyser-Parker sprinted with about 30 students out a side entrance as police converged on the building. The students fled to the third story of a nearby dorm, where they sat, stunned, on the floor.
“What’s going on?,’” Keyser-Parker asked.
At 4:22 p.m., an alert with the answer no one wanted flashed across campus cellphones. “There’s an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering,” it warned. “Lock doors, silence phones and stay hidden until further notice.”
The gunshots that exploded in an Ivy League lecture hall Saturday afternoon took the lives of two students and injured nine others. Terrified undergrads bolted for safety, huddling for hours inside barricaded campus buildings while police scrambled to evacuate students and launched a manhunt for the killer.
Authorities said on Sunday that they have detained a person of interest in a hotel room in Coventry, R.I., about 20 miles from campus.
Less than 24 hours earlier as the sun was setting on Providence, where the university has stood for more than two centuries, students were cramming for final exams, taking their tests and getting ready to head off on winter break. Stores lighted for the holidays were bustling.
At around 4 p.m., Nathaniel Russo, a junior and teaching assistant for the popular Principles of Economics course, walked into his dorm room to study for finals. A flood of texts came into a group chat: “Is everyone okay?”
Word started spreading that a shooter was at the Barus & Holley building. Russo checked the course’s schedule to see if any review sessions were scheduled in the building at the time. He felt “a sinking feeling” when he realized one section was meeting there then.
“Those could be students in my sections,” he thought. “It could’ve been any one of us.”
Students in the session were finishing up their review and getting ready to leave when authorities say a person, described as in their 20s and dressed in black, opened fire.
“I didn’t make it all the way to the front, so I kind of (lay) between some seats,” Spencer Yang, a freshman, told the student newspaper the Daily Herald. “The shooter came in, started shooting—I got hit in the leg.”
Outside the building, safety alerts sent people dashing for shelter. At the Hillel center, students gathering to celebrate the end of the Jewish Sabbath with a candle-lighting ceremony rushed into a safe room, said Eli Banyasz, a freshman. They locked the doors and barricaded them with chairs and desks.
Most students didn’t have phones with them in observance of Jewish law, so they shared the few available from friends to tell their parents that they were safe. Students lighted candles, offering prayers for peace and safety as they followed alerts and terrified messages from friends.
Students spent the evening knowing there were casualties but not knowing who they were, said Marlo Hulnick, a 21-year-old student who was at the Hillel. “It will be terrible no matter whose names are attached,” he said.
Talia Levine, a senior and varsity sailor studying international relations, was sheltering in place in the science library across from the engineering building. From a window on the 11th floor she watched police cars swarm the scene of the shooting. She and about 20 other students barricaded the elevators with tables and chairs. Then they hid in the library stacks and made plans for what to do if the shooter broke in.
At about 6:30 p.m., police officers kicked down the stairwell door, Levine said. “Keep your hands up,” they said, according to a video Levine shared with the Journal. “We’re here to help…We’ll get you out of here safely.”
Police set up a perimeter around part of the campus by 11 p.m. Inside the zone, students in their dorms were told to stay there, while police began evacuating people in academic buildings. Students who had been huddling inside the Barus & Holley building since the shooting were evacuated in buses to a campus athletic center.
Classmates outside the zone welcomed friends into their homes for the night, offering a place to rest and food. Other students spent the night in local hotels.
Meanwhile, hundreds of law enforcement officers, including the FBI, hunted for the shooter. At a popular coffee shop across the street from the engineering building, FBI agents reviewed surveillance footage with the landlord searching for images of the shooter, according to a post on the Ceremony cafe Instagram feed.
At a hotel room in Coventry, FBI agents detained a person of interest, according to a post on X by FBI Director Kash Patel.
For Mia Tretta, who was shot in the abdomen at age 15 in a shooting at Saugus High School in Santa Clarita, Calif., experiencing another tragedy—this time while hiding in her college dormitory with a roommate—was “surreal.”
“My world is shattered,” said the Brown junior studying international affairs. “No one should ever have to experience one school shooting, let alone two.”
Andrea Capotosto, who works in finance at Brown’s School of Public Health, was putting up a Christmas tree in her North Providence home when she learned of the shooting. Not wanting to sit inside and cry, she asked herself, ‘What can I do?’”
She bought lollipops and a teddy bear, and by 10 a.m. she had set up shop outside a campus dining hall where she consoled students Sunday morning with offers of “free mom hugs.”
”If my children were far away and they couldn’t get to be with their parents, this is what I would want someone to do,” she said.
Write to Neil Mehta at neil.mehta@wsj.com, Jared Mitovich at jared.mitovich@wsj.com and Douglas Belkin at Doug.Belkin@wsj.com