Surviving the Brown University shooting

When King David Linksfield Dux of 2023, Ricci Waksman, and her Brown University lab group met late last Saturday, 13 December, they chose to meet on the second floor of the Barus and Holley engineering building rather than the first. This twist of fate saved their lives from a shooter who killed two students and injured nine others at the Ivy League university in Providence, Rhode Island in the United States. 

“This decision ended up being such a miracle because we were further removed from all the commotion that happened on the first floor,” Waksman told the SA Jewish Report this week. 

Waksman, who is halfway through her second year of engineering, was getting in her last day of studying before heading back to South Africa to spend the December holidays in Cape Town with her family. 

A gunman opened fire in a first-floor classroom of the Barus and Holley building where students had gathered to review for their final exam in Principles of Economics, Brown’s most popular class dominated by freshmen students. The school went into lockdown for 12 hours and subsequently cancelled all academic exercises for the rest of the semester. 

Waksman had spent most of her morning submerged in a take-home exam, stopping briefly at Hillel House (the centre for Jewish life on campus) for lunch. By 16:00, she was on her way to the Barus and Holley engineering building to meet her lab group. 

She said they were “calmly working on our lab report, busy doing the code” when a student in the room noticed a message on a community WhatsApp group: ‘Active shooter on campus’. Initially, the group was sceptical, assuming it might be a false alarm. 

But when she got another message from a friend who said she had heard the shots and ran for cover, the realisation dawned on Waksman and her group. “She was saying, ‘I left all my stuff inside, I’m terrified’,” said Waksman. “Then we knew, okay, well, this is real. We need to hide.” 

She said they were all in a state of shock. “We were moving in slow motion… considering all five of us are engineers and meant to be good problem solvers, we didn’t think to put the tables in front of the door. We were putting wheeled chairs in front of the doors, if that would do anything.” They eventually moved heavy conference tables to barricade the door and another to block a large window “in case shots were going to come through”. 

Across campus, fellow King Davidian Joseph Joffe who matriculated in 2022 was in the middle of a final exam when the prompters suddenly ran through the halls shouting to “lock the doors”. 

Joffe told the SA Jewish Report, “They were saying, ‘Hi everyone, we just wanted you to know that there’s an active shooter on campus,’” Joffe said. Stuck in the largest lecture hall on campus, Joffe watched as students began “barricading the doors… they put a whiteboard against the doors. Everyone was putting their backpacks against the doors.” Like Waksman, Joffe and his classmates were forced to “crouch on the floor and wait for quite a long time”. 

For Waksman and her group in the engineering building, the silence was eventually broken by the sound of police radios. By peeking through the blinds to signal for help, the policemen outside got a fright, said Waksman. “There were six or so cops with these huge guns pointed at our door, shouting ‘Open the door! Open the door!’” 

The students complied, hands raised, shouting that they were just students. “Obviously they have to take every precaution and make sure that we weren’t the shooter,” Waksman said. “They took us all out of the room, lined us up against the wall, and patted us down.” Once cleared, the students were ushered out of the building, leaving all their belongings behind. 

Waksman and her group managed to get into the nearest university residence building, where they were taken in by a group of strangers. “There were at least 20 to 25 of us in this suite-style room,” she said. Rumours of more shots sent the group into a fresh panic. 

“We barricaded the door. We put this big couch in front of it and split up into two of the bedrooms and the bathroom and locked the doors,” said Waksman. They were squashed into rooms, with Waksman in a room with about a dozen other people. “Five people were on the bed, the rest of us squashed on the floor in the dark for at least two hours, sitting there whispering.” 

They remained in that suite until 07:00 the following morning. 

Joffe’s experience was similarly gruelling. He was moved to the basement around 18:30 and managed to get to the campus sports facilities after midnight. “At about 03:30 the following morning, they put us on buses back to our rooms,” he said. 

Waksman missed her plane home during the lockdown. “I was meant to leave campus for the airport at 03:00 the morning after the shooting,” she said. While she was huddled on a dorm floor, her family in South Africa was frantically trying to manage the situation. 

“My family was trying to change my ticket.” Because the campus remained a crime scene, she couldn’t retrieve her passport or belongings until much later. Fortunately, they managed to reschedule the ticket for the following day. Joffe also moved his flight back to South Africa earlier to escape the aftermath. 

“One of the two killed is one of my closest friend’s best friend,” Waksman said. She told how she had spent the lockdown night supporting her friend, who was “freaking out that she couldn’t get hold of her”. 

For Waksman, the journey from King David to Brown was years in the making. She had been at King David Linksfield from Grade R through to matric, becoming the Dux of her 2023 graduating class, earning eight distinctions. 

“Anyone who knew me knew that I was planning on studying somewhere in America, and Brown was my absolute dream school from the beginning,” Waksman said. The fascination wasn’t just with the prestige, but with a specific feeling she encountered during a tour at the end of Grade 11. “I toured the campus, and just walking on the campus, it was as if I knew that that’s where I wanted to go. I can’t describe the feeling,” she said. 

Waksman said that the appeal of the Providence institution goes far beyond its aesthetic charm. Known as the “happiest Ivy”, Brown operates under a unique academic structure called the Open Curriculum. “They describe it as being the architects of your own education,” Waksman explains. “They want engineers to have taken philosophy classes, and they want people to explore all their interests and have power over their education.” 

For a student with Waksman’s drive, the ability to tailor her degree while being surrounded by a supportive rather than cutthroat community, was the ultimate draw. “It’s the most supportive community in the world. I know at other universities, people won’t study with their friends in case their friends do better than them, but Brown students will do anything for each other. It’s the best place on earth.” 

Waksman is now in Cape Town finding reprieve with her family. “I’m happy to be watching the sea and just being in a happy sunny place,” she said. 

The shooting ended a turbulent year for Brown, which has been targeted by the Trump administration with threats to research funding, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. It recently struck a $50 million (R837 million) settlement with the government over allegations of antisemitism tied to pro-Palestinian protests, including a student-led proposal to divest from Israel that was rejected by the school’s board of overseers. 

Brown has a Jewish president, Christina Paxson, and the highest proportion of Jewish students in the Ivy League, with particular growth in recent years among its Orthodox student population. It recently hosted a major gathering to celebrate 130 years of Jewish life that attracted alumni from around the world as well as prominent figures like Robert Kraft, founder of the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism.