Content warning: This article includes discussion of the Dec. 13 mass shooting at Brown University.
Almost 90 minutes had passed since a gunman stormed into a Brown lecture hall and opened fire around 4 p.m. The shooter was still at large. Two and a half blocks from where the shooting took place, more than 100 students and employees were sheltering in the Sharpe Refectory’s main dining room.
Around 5:30 p.m, students and staff moved downstairs to hide in the building’s basement at the suggestion of an Andrews Commons cook who phoned a colleague working in the Ratty.
The scenes in the Ratty and Andrews that day have raised questions among Dining Services employees about Brown’s level of preparedness for campus violence.
In interviews with The Herald, 13 Dining Services employees said they were not trained on building-specific response plans for an active shooter incident on campus. Some of the employees were granted anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Eleven of the employees — some of whom have worked at Brown for decades — said they did not receive intruder training of any kind leading up to the Dec. 13 shooting that killed Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov ’29 and Ella Cook ’28. Two employees said they participated in general trainings — one said he was trained at a mandatory onboarding session and the other said he received training at a workshop for dining workers.
Experts told The Herald it is ideal to prepare employees for their roles in intruder situations — though communicating overarching safety plans with too many people could create a security risk.
In a February interview with The Herald, President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 said the University has “a really well-developed protocol for management of emergencies writ large.” Active shooter trainings were not mandatory for employees and took place when requested by specific departments, she said.
University spokesperson Brian Clark wrote in an email to The Herald that training has been available “for many years.” Additional optional hostile intruder training for staff, faculty and students will also be available beginning next week.
Other guardrails have also been implemented since the shooting, employees told The Herald, including panic buttons at Andrews, security guards at each dining hall and restricted swipe access to buildings.
George Barboza, the vice president of Dining Services, declined interview and comment requests and referred The Herald to the University’s communications office.
When a student rushed into the Ratty’s front entrance shortly after 4 p.m. on Dec. 13 and said there was an active shooter on campus, cashier Rosa Gonzalez first thought it was a “terrible joke,” she recalled. She had not yet received an emergency alert from the University.
Across campus at Andrews, workers had just reopened for dinner when a student came over “panicking,” an employee recalled.
When Brown sent out an emergency alert about the shooting at 4:22 p.m., “everyone scattered,” the Andrews employee recalled. “There was nothing set. Nobody told us, ‘Okay, this is what you need to do.’”
The Andrews staff locked the kitchen’s sliding gate and retreated with students to a hiding spot.
For safety reasons, The Herald has refrained from describing the specifics of lockdown areas that are not publicly accessible.
“Was there a better place for us to go?” the Andrews worker said. “I think there should have been a better place, but there was nothing set up because nobody expected this to happen.”
Dan Dusseau, a law enforcement veteran and campus public safety consultant, said in a February interview with The Herald that it is “best practice” to provide location-based guidance and training on emergency situation protocols, but it is an “unachievable goal” to do so in every building.
Back in the Ratty, a group of students took cover in the center of the dining room. Most remained seated at their tables. For several minutes, Latin music still played from the speakers. Eventually, students in the alcove areas were told by employees to move away from the windows, toward the middle of the building.
There in the dining room, they waited.
The room’s approximately a dozen doors were locked, but they were not barricaded. The scene prompted concern for one worker, who said he saw Telma Ramos, the supervisor on duty, “distraught, sitting over in the corner texting someone.”
The worker approached Ramos and asked what the University’s protocol for the situation was. “She told me that we didn’t have any protocol,” he recalled, other than “to lock down the doors.”
Ramos usually oversees Verney-Woolley Dining Hall, but she was at the Ratty on Dec. 13. Ramos said she felt grateful for how students in the building followed instructions. She declined to comment on her training, citing policy that she must receive permission from her boss.
“It felt like we were winging it,” said Timothy Hilliard, a food service worker who was in the Ratty that day. But, he noted, Ramos was “doing her best.” After moving to the dining room, “we were just kind of hanging around,” he said.
Luis Cabrera, a first cook at the Ratty, was downstairs in the kitchen when he was alerted via text of the shooting. Ramos eventually instructed him to join the crowd upstairs, he said. According to Cabrera, Ramos said it was the protocol to gather in the dining room.
But after false reports of a second shooting circulated, Cabrera received a phone call from a coworker at Andrews who had returned home earlier in the day. The coworker, who declined to be publicly identified, urged him to find a more hidden space to shelter.
“You guys shouldn’t be there,” Cabrera recalled his coworker saying. He suggested Cabrera move to the basement where “there are a lot of hiding spots.”
Cabrera found Barboza in his Ratty office to ask whether he could bring students down to the lower level.
Barboza told Cabrera that he could do whatever he wanted, according to Cabrera. “And that’s when I take everybody to the basement,” he said. By around 5:40 p.m, all students and most workers were in the basement.
Although workers steadily guarded one of the basement’s two doors, the other remained open with a tube on the floor, which one Ratty worker said has “something to do with the generators” in the building.
Dusseau said that it is safer to shelter in rooms with fewer entry points. But Jaclyn Schildkraut — the executive director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government’s Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium — noted that there has never been a recorded instance “in which a shooter was able to defeat a locked door.”
At the Ratty, the open basement door was barricaded with a shelf of food supplies. Cabrera stationed staff with pocket knives or boxcutters to protect the area.
Cabrera’s decision-making was not based on any official plan, he said — in fact, he had “never” heard of one.
“Everything that I was basically doing,” he added, was “from all the drills that I did when I was in high school, videos and movies that I watched growing up.”
As students took refuge in the basement for the next seven hours — calling their families, playing card games and napping — employees including Cabrera and Gonzalez passed out Oreo cookies, bananas and water. Hilliard manned the door as workers escorted students upstairs when they needed the restroom.
Back at Andrews, the group used a bucket as their toilet. “ It wasn’t safe to go to the restroom from where we were,” the Andrews employee recalled. It “was ridiculous, but got to do what you got to do.”
The Department of Public Safety and Emergency Management has offered active shooting training when requested by “units and groups across campus,” according to a Monday Today@Brown message announcing additional optional hostile intruder safety trainings for individual workers.
Clark did not respond to a question about if dining workers had taken the original course.
According to Schildkraut, American universities typically “typically require some form of annual compliance training,” with varying content from school to school. She wrote that in her experience, active shooter preparedness was included but “only minimally.”
Employees expressed frustration that Brown’s new active shooter trainings were not implemented more immediately, and that they do not appear to be location-specific.
“We’re almost two and a half months in,” the Andrews employee said in a mid-February interview. “And nothing. It’s almost like (the shooting) didn't happen.”
Amid a rise in school shootings nationwide, the Dec. 13 shooting at Brown was the first at a school in Rhode Island since at least 2008. On Brown’s campus, “we never think about that type of stuff,” Cabrera said. “But unfortunately,” he added, “this is something normal in our country.”
On Dec. 13, Cabrera was “working just like a normal day.” Hilliard was in the bathroom when he first received the notification and Gonzalez was browsing online for wedding decorations.
“I went from wedding planning to, ‘Oh my God. I might die,’” Gonzalez said.
James Libresco reported from the Sharpe Refectory during the Dec. 13 mass shooting.
James Libresco is a senior staff writer covering staff & student labor. He is a first-year student from Alexandria, Va. studying political science and contemplative studies. In his free time, he can be found playing basketball, meditating, or losing in Among Us.
