Campus Alert Archive
RISD

Two Words Missing: RISD's 90-Minute Wait to Say 'Active Shooter'

RIactive shooteremergency notificationmedium confidence

When a gunman opened fire in Brown University's Barus & Holley building shortly after 4 PM EST on December 13, 2025, killing two and wounding nine, the Rhode Island School of Design sat a few hundred feet away on the same College Hill ridge. RISD's first alert at 4:28 PM EST only mentioned vague 'police activity' near Brook and Thayer streets. RISD did not tell its community that the nearby incident was an active shooter until 5:30 PM EST — a roughly 90-minute gap that students said left them dangerously uninformed.

Alerts
2
Response
—
Killed
—
Injured
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Institution
Rhode Island School of Design
Private Masters · RI
~2,500 studentsRISD Alert
Confirmed Timeline

Alert Sequence

2 messages in sequence · 2 verified verbatim

INITIAL ALERTSMS
Verified verbatimThe Brown Daily Herald, which quoted the exact 4:28 p.m. RISDAlert text; corroborated by the Change.org petition and WPRI/NewsNation121 chars
RISDAlert: Critical update. Police activity reported in the area of Brook and Thayer Streets. Avoid until further notice.
Verbatim: The Brown Daily Herald quoted this 4:28 p.m. EST alert word-for-word; the text was independently corroborated by the student-organized Change.org petition and WPRI/NewsNation coverage. It conspicuously omitted any mention of an active shooter.
Brook and Thayer streets bracket the College Hill blocks shared by RISD and Brown; the alert located the threat geographically without characterizing it.
This alert went out roughly 6 minutes after Brown's own 4:22 PM EST active-shooter alert, but conveyed far less about the nature of the danger.
UPDATESMS+1h 2m
Verified verbatimWPRI / Change.org petition documentation, which quoted the 5:30 p.m. RISDAlert verbatim; corroborated by NewsNation149 chars
RISDAlert: Critical Update Active Shooter on Brown Campus. Police activity reported in the area of Brook and Thayer. Avoid area until further notice.
Verbatim: this 5:30 p.m. EST alert was the first RISD message to name an active shooter, reproduced word-for-word in the student-organized Change.org petition and quoted by WPRI and NewsNation. Note the missing 'Streets' after 'Brook and Thayer' and no period after 'Critical Update' as published.
Students described the roughly 90-minute delay between the 4:28 PM 'police activity' notice and this 5:30 PM active-shooter notice as unnecessary and potentially dangerous.
Labeled an update rather than an all-clear: it escalates the threat characterization to 'Active Shooter' rather than lifting any restrictions.
Context

Background

The Rhode Island School of Design shares College Hill with Brown University, its buildings interlaced with Brown's along Brook, Thayer, and Benefit streets. When Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente shot 11 people in Brown's Barus & Holley engineering building shortly after 4 PM EST on December 13, 2025, killing two students and wounding nine, the danger was effectively next door to RISD. Brown's own system pushed an active-shooter alert at 4:22 PM EST instructing people to lock doors and hide. RISD's first message at 4:28 PM EST, however, described only 'police activity' near Brook and Thayer streets without naming the threat, and the school did not characterize the incident as an active shooter to its own community until 5:30 PM EST. RISD students publicly criticized the lag, and the episode prompted student petitions to better integrate the RISD and Brown alert systems. The case is a study in the hazards of vague, geography-only emergency messaging when two adjacent institutions share the same physical risk but operate separate notification systems.
Analysis

Key Findings

RISD's first alert (4:28 PM EST) described only 'police activity' and omitted that an active shooter was operating a few hundred feet away at Brown
RISD did not explicitly notify its community of an active shooter until 5:30 PM EST, a roughly 90-minute gap from its first vague notice
Two adjacent institutions sharing the same physical danger ran separate alert systems, producing inconsistent threat characterization
Student backlash drove petitions to merge or coordinate the RISD and Brown campus alert systems after the shooting
Outcome
No casualties occurred at RISD itself; the shooting and deaths were at neighboring Brown University. The lag between RISD's vague 4:28 PM notice and its explicit 5:30 PM active-shooter notice became the focus of student criticism and reporting on cross-institutional alert coordination.
Provenance

Sources

  1. News
    Shooting at Brown University, RISD didn't provide enough warning - Boston Globe
    bostonglobe.com
  2. Student Paper
    RISD students express concern about lack of alerts during shooting at Brown - Brown Daily Herald
    browndailyherald.com
  3. Source
    2025 Brown University shooting - Wikipedia
    en.wikipedia.org
  4. News
    Students petition to merge RISD and Brown campus alert systems after shooting - WPRI
    wpri.com
Tags
active-shooteremergency-notificationrhode-islandrisdalert-delaycollege-hill
Added May 2026Updated May 2026Via ingestion