A masked gunman stormed into Brown University’s Barus and Holley engineering building during final exam season on Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025, spraying a crowded lecture hall with more than 40 rounds and leaving two students dead and nine wounded. The scene on Providence’s campus has been chaotic, with investigators scrambling to find usable video and asking the public for help while the university tries to mend terrified students and grieving families. The seriousness of the attack and the glaring gaps in the initial evidence have left the city and nation demanding answers.
What should have been competent, transparent police work instead looked amateurish and reactive: authorities detained a person of interest at a hotel overnight and then abruptly released him, admitting the leads had gone cold and that the investigation was essentially starting over. That reversal — and the acknowledgment there were “not a lot of cameras” where the shooter struck — reads like a tragic catalog of preventable failure, not the confident public safety response citizens deserve. Officials’ fumbling only deepens the sense that our institutions are unprepared for violence on modern campuses.
Megyn Kelly and her team rightly tore into the late-night press conference and the grainy clips the police trotted out, pointing out that what officials called “leads” were often little more than dark, unusable footage and soothing public-relations language. Conservative voices have every reason to be skeptical when a flashlight-show press conference substitutes for real investigative progress, and when authorities act like more spin will substitute for answers. Kelly’s critique was not theater; it was the sort of blunt accountability journalism citizens expect when life-and-death failures are on the line.
This episode exposes a painful truth about the surveillance state: having cameras everywhere doesn’t matter if you don’t have cameras where people actually are, or if police fail to harvest and analyze footage intelligently. Reporting has highlighted the disconnect between the promises of constant monitoring and the reality of blind spots in old buildings and poorly coordinated systems, a failure that literally cost young people their lives. If universities and city cops want the public’s trust, they must stop treating security like a talking point and start treating it like a mission.
Beyond the immediate investigative missteps lies a toxic mix of bad policy and false comforts: colleges that push disarmament policies, administrators who prioritize optics over safety, and officials who too quickly tell communities there is “no ongoing threat” even while admitting they have a killer still at large. Students and neighbors are understandably furious and frightened; their petitioning for more protection and clearer protocols is the predictable reaction to institutional complacency. Until leaders accept that soft targets need armed, trained defenders and clear, reliable alert systems, these tragedies will repeat.
Megyn Kelly’s relentless questioning of the press conference served a public good by refusing to let officials hide behind vague platitudes while a murderer walks free. What this tragedy demands now is accountability, better planning, and a real overhaul of campus safety — measures that won’t be pushed by empty statements but by reporters, families, and citizens insisting on results. The city must catch the shooter, and our institutions must rebuild trust by proving they can protect the innocent rather than managing the narrative.
