Brown University launches new campus recovery effort in wake of fatal shooting

Local News

“The Brown community is resilient, caring, and strong. We are ever true.”

Brown University announced it is launching a “whole campus” recovery effort in response to the on-campus fatal shooting that claimed the lives of two students and injured nine others.

“The name of the Brown Ever True initiative was inspired by the ways many of you naturally invoked this phrase as a clarion call in the days after the tragedy. In countless emails, calls, and letters I have received, members of our community have insisted that we must declare loudly to the world all that “we are,” wrote Brown President Christina Paxson in a “healing and recovery effort” email sent to the Brown community on Jan 5.

The program, called Brown Ever True, is dedicated to increased the university’s sense of security and safety throughout long- and short-term recovery plans, and aims to ensure students, faculty, and staff are equipped with proper mental health support after the “senseless act of violence,” announced the historic university.

“We must re-establish that the Brown campus – on College Hill and in the Jewelry District – continues to feel safe to learn, live and work. And, we must continue to celebrate all of the ways that Brown is still Brown,” the university wrote. 

The program is set to increase campus security in “visible and reassuring ways,” including security adjustments across College Hill and in the Jewelry district, both hotspots for college students, and plans to add more blue light phones and panic buttons around campus.

“We have doubled staffing by Brown’s department of public safety, and law, and security personnel from multiple agencies have been a part of a massive mobilization to secure our campus, day and night,” Paxson said in a videotaped statement.  

Brown plans to install a campus memorial to the victims of the shooting and plans to hold annual remembrance events, according to the website’s Roadmap to Recovery page.

On Dec. 13, 2025 a gunman entered a study session in the Barus & Holley engineering and physics building and fired 40 rounds from a 9 mm handgun, killing Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, and Mukhammad Azis Umurzokov, a first-year student and dual U.S citizen from Uzbekistan, and injuring nine others.

All nine injured victims have been released from the hospital, Paxson said in the Jan. 5 email.