Hilary Levey Friedman, a Special Assistant Attorney General in the Rhode Island Attorney General’s office who formerly taught in the education department at Brown University and whose husband teaches at the Ivy League school, was out of town with one of her sons when she received the shocking news there was an active shooter on campus.
“We’ve never had a mass shooting like this in Rhode Island before,” she said. “I’ve always, unfortunately felt it was a matter of ‘if not when,’ just because of the state of the world and lack of common sense gun control, even though we do have good legislation here.”
Friedman drove back to Providence to meet her husband and their other son Saturday night. But because of the shelter-in-place order, they were unable to return to their home just a few blocks from Brown’s campus. Instead, they booked a hotel around a 20-minute drive from the school, intentionally choosing a location “away from everything.”
She woke up to text messages saying a person of interest had been detained in the same hotel where they were staying. The lobby was full of FBI agents and the parking lot filled with journalists, she said.
“Never in my wildest dreams would I have thought the person of interest was in that hotel,” she said. “I can barely comprehend it.”
With a suspect in custody, Friedman and her family have since returned to their home near campus. But she says the deadly shooting has “disrupted” the surrounding communities. She once taught in the building where the gunman opened fire, she said.
“It’s a traumatic event, and it is like a community trauma,” she said. “I think it will take a while to recover, and there will always be a scar – there’s just no question.”
