- I would say 95% of mass shootings don't go down this way.

This person made it a point not to be captured.

They didn't linger, they didn't stay long, they didn't go to other parts of the building to commit more murder and harm more people.

If you look at the scale of other mass shootings, this isn't nearly what it could have been.

And that's a big puzzle, I think, for investigators.

(dramatic upbeat music) - And welcome to this episode of "Lively."

I'm Jim Hummel.

We appreciate you joining us.

And this week we are joined by Brown University Professor Wendy Schiller and "Boston Globe" reporter Steph Machado.

A shooting on the Brown University campus last weekend that left two students dead and nine injured prompted a massive law enforcement mobilization, but right now, still not much to show for it.

So we preface this by saying, we're taping this on a Thursday afternoon.

We know by the time people watch this, things may have changed.

Steph, you've been in it right from the start.

You got the call on Saturday.

- Yeah, you know, Saturday around four o'clock, I had just gotten home.

I was actually, I live fairly close to the campus, so I had been walking around in that area, was about to head out, and then got a text from a student that said there's an active shooter on campus and you know, sometimes there's false alarms.

So I kind of dropped everything, but hedged, hoped it wasn't true, and then ended up over there on campus a short time later and have pretty much been covering it ever since.

It's obviously a horrific tragedy.

And where we are here, you know, Thursday afternoon, they have not yet caught someone, but obviously things are developing by the hour.

- Wendy?

- Yeah, I was actually, had taken a walk quite near that area and was at a coffee shop, a local coffee shop, and ended up with my husband and ended up with several Brown students and another colleague when we got the news.

So it was really, obviously, as you can say, you know, startling to hear that.

- You've been at Brown 30 plus years now.

What's this been like as part of the Brown community?

- Well, I mean, I do think in the age of the last decade or so, I mean, certainly we had Columbine and we've had other horrific, you know, Sandy Hook and Uvalde.

But I think, you know, in the last decade it's become more top of mind.

But I think Rhode Island and Providence sort of had thought, "Well, you know, probably won't happen here."

And I think everybody thinks that until it happens.

- I hoped that I would never, ever cover a school shooting.

And I've covered a lot of horrific tragedies that have happened in Rhode Island and elsewhere, but every time there's a school shooting somewhere else in the country, I think about how would I handle that?

And I just, again, hoped and prayed it would never happen to Rhode Island.

So it's very upsetting that it has.

And I think that I am very proud of how the local press has handled themselves and is covering it and trying to inform the public as best we can, when there is a lot of misinformation spreading around online.

- It's a whole nother issue.

And I've been in these cases here, I've covered big cases in Rhode Island, where all of a sudden the national media comes in.

It's a whole different ball game now with social media, but the networks come in.

So take us into some of the reporting, some of the back and forth.

We've heard it, but, you know, standing there at those press conferences, what's that been like and what are some of the, you know, the back and forth, have you gotten things meaningful out of those?

I know some people say, "Well, they're not saying a lot."

- I think the first day, yes, because first of all, obviously only the local press was there because it happened so suddenly and there was a press conference, I think, two hours after the shooting.

And we were trying to, you know, it's basic who, what, when or why, what do we know?

What building did he go into?

What do we know about where he went afterwards?

All these things, they put out the first video that first night.

National and international press starts flying in and I think it got, it gets very big.

There's a ton of people asking questions.

There's a lot of, they're hearing things from their editors in New York or Washington or London or wherever, saying, ask this and ask that.

So I think it has gotten a little bit tense at the press conferences, people asking things that have maybe been asked and answered previously, and so there's- - Because they're just getting up to speed, right.

- 'Cause they're just getting there, they're just getting up to speed.

They don't realize that certain things have already been reported.

So sometimes, like I was at one of the press conferences where they put out a bunch of new videos and there was just so much, I guess, a little bit of show boating and just so many people yelling questions.

I realized at the end, we didn't establish, where was this video shot?

What time, what street, you know, who's, was it from a private residence?

And so, you know, I was able to go get those facts later from police.

So it's been, I think, as it always is when a national news story happens in your community.

I've always been a local news reporter, so I have always covered the community that I live in.

And so there's always a little bit of that tension when the national press comes in, they're not as familiar.

I've met some of them.

They're lovely people and they ask for directions or they ask for, you know, where should I go to dinner?

Things like that.

So it's not any sort of shade on the national press, it's more just like, it adds to the sort of tension.

And again, there's so many people in those press conferences trying to get their questions in, so they're perhaps not as useful, especially when there's not a lot of new news.

So people are asking a lot of questions that have either been answered before or trying to dissect what went wrong, if something went wrong earlier in the investigation, I think the press conferences are most useful when there's actual news, new stuff to share.

- Yeah, and also, Brown itself, the students at Brown, the students that come here, they're either, you know, sometimes the people in the media are alums or parents and they have a lot of internships.

So I know several students who intern, for example, for CNN.

So one of 'em was on CNN Live at, you know, one in the morning on Saturday night, another person was interviewed on the street.

So there are these sort of what you would call elite connections that Brown students have to national media- - Good point.

- In ways that you wouldn't think.

You know, John Berman from CNN, his son was visiting that night.

- I saw that interview.

- Right.

And so he did the interview.

So I think that's what happens.

It can happen at any college, but I think in particular for Brown.

- Yep.

- Yeah, there have been, those kinds of connections exist.

So I think there's more channels to national media than maybe in other places.

- [Steph] Yeah, that's a good point.

- Wendy, you were talking about, the sad part, we were talking off camera before we started, that our generation, we talked about nuclear bombs.

You were post 9/11.

These kids know the drill.

I mean, how sad is that that most of them know when an active shooter comes in, maybe somebody who's 30, 40, or 50 wouldn't, but they've done those drills in high school.

- Yeah, no, I will say, I just wanna sort of say, the staff at Seven Stars is probably not college, but you know, not older than 30.

They knew what to do.

They were not overly panicked.

- And that's where you were - And that's where we were on Point Street and we went to Somo Sushi next door and they were not overly panicked.

And I think generationally, this is something that's the norm, sadly, for not even college students anymore.

You know, I think anybody under 40.

And so I think that's something that maybe has not penetrated the psyche of the Brown faculty per se, because that's not really the cohort.

- Yeah, there were students who were interviewed who were in school shootings in high school or elementary school and now go to Brown.

And so the fact that they, this isn't even their first time being in this situation, is really heartbreaking.

- Yeah.

It's gotta be tough.

Your colleague, Ed Fitzpatrick, and I commend people to read his story today.

He talked to somebody at Roger Williams about how, people like, you see the national media and you see people locally.

How can you not catch this guy in this internet age and the videos and all of this, how unique, and I use that word very sparingly, how very, very different this case is.

Talk about that.

- Yeah, so the article has some terrific tables that sort of say percentage wise, but I would say 95% of mass shootings don't go down this way.

You know, the mass majority are that the perpetrator kills themself or they're killed by police or they're captured.

That's the vast, super majority of cases.

This person made it a point not to be captured.

They didn't linger, they didn't stay long, they didn't go to other parts of the building to commit more murder and harm more people.

They purposely, I think, literally cut it short, not short enough.

Obviously there's loss of life and injury.

But if you look at the scale of other mass shootings, this isn't nearly what it could have been.

And that's a big puzzle, I think, for investigators.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And I was trying to pull up the exact stats, but it is very unusual for the subject to not either be dead on the scene or captured on the scene or captured within a short timeframe.

And so again, we're here Thursday afternoon, we'll see if the person is identified or captured shortly, or if it'll be a very long manhunt.

We really don't know.

It reminds me a little bit of the Boston Marathon bombing manhunt that went on for a number of days.

- They found him in the boat in that neighborhood.

- They found him in the boat.

I can't remember exactly how many days, but it was not, you know, they didn't catch him the next day or anything like that.

- But there was a subsequent murder after the bombing there, right?

- Yes.

I was just gonna say- - That's the different part here.

- He committed another crime and so then there was an entirely new set of evidence and photos and sightings.

And there has been, again, as we tape this Thursday afternoon, no sightings of this person since Saturday.

And so he could be anywhere and that's why police, you know, people keep asking police, do you think he's still in the area?

Do you think he's still in the area?

And they say, we don't know.

- I found it interesting that AG Neronha, who I didn't hear in some of the early press conferences, and he's done some national, I think it's appropriate, he's the AG, said, "We are gonna get this guy and when it cracks open, it's gonna happen quickly."

And if I, clearly they know a lot more than we do, but I would be careful being that confident, maybe just 'cause the track of things going.

But the fact that he said this, I wonder if there's some people who were thinking it's been this long, is this guy ever gonna be caught?

I think some people worry about that.

- Always, I mean, I think you always worry about that until you know you have the person.

And by the way, until you get a conviction, right?

'Cause you- - Right.

- We already had someone detained who didn't end up getting charged and so just 'cause they arrest someone or detain someone doesn't mean that that's the person.

Yeah, I think what's interesting with AG Neronha, 'cause he's become a little bit more vocal at the press conferences, is he, I think, has a difference of opinion about how much information to put out because his office is gonna need to be the one who prosecutes this person, unless they end up being charged with federal crimes.

But at the moment, his office is, he's the one who's gonna prosecute this person and he's already thinking 10 steps ahead to, "I don't wanna be revealing evidence."

- Right.

- Or, you know, I don't wanna be, there was a little bit of a dust up where Colonel Perez had confirmed that the firearm was a handgun.

But then at yesterday's news conference, Attorney General Neronha said, "I'm not going to say what kind of weapon it was because I'm interviewing witnesses, you know, we're interviewing witnesses and we want them to remember from their memories, not from what they saw at a press conference about some of the details."

So I think there's a little bit of maybe a difference of opinion about how much they should be putting out there.

But the public is hungry for information and some of this information can help the public, help find the person, help find the guy, right?

Especially details about where he went both before and after the shooting.

- Yeah, I mean the amount of pressure on our elected officials, and a lot of people don't know that the state's attorney general prosecutes our crime in Rhode Island.

- Yeah.

There's no district attorney.

- We don't want DAs.

- There's no DA.

And I think that they have, I think there's some tension, but on the whole, I think they've represented themselves well in their press conferences in the sense of, you know, being not panicked.

Neronha, you know, we know he likes to vent and type on Twitter and picks fights with people, formerly known, X, formerly known as Twitter.

- [Jim] But he's been more circumspect.

- He has a little bit, but I think he has sort of like, "Oh, we already answered that question," like you said, but he's under the most pressure, because as you said, hopefully when this person is caught, he's gotta prosecute and win that case.

But I think generally speaking, the amount of pressure on them, and it grows every day, because it's national spotlight.

It's not just the state of Rhode Island, it's the whole country.

In fact, internationally.

- And network news every night.

- Everywhere, and so I think that they've comported themselves, I think, in this circumstance, which is unique to Rhode Island at this moment in their history, fairly calmly given everything else that's going on.

- It's strange to see our little city sort of thrust into this national spotlight and for people to be scrutinizing these officials who we've known forever, who I've, we've covered forever, and now be seeing so much national press and attention on them.

- I knew Brett Smiley when he ran Charlie Fogarty's campaign.

That's why he came here from Chicago all of those years ago.

We saw him during COVID as Gina Raimondo's Director of Administration.

And I think your colleague, Dan McGowan, had a column on him earlier.

- Yep.

- He's been grace under fire, under pressure.

I think that Smiley has done, you know, everybody's gonna get the grief from the people that don't know him.

But you covered Providence, and do, for so many years.

What is your assessment of how the mayor's holding up?

- I think that he seems to be projecting an air of calmness.

You know, he's not a police officer.

And so I think where Neronha disagreed with him a little bit about how he talked about the investigation, how he called it a setback, that they arrested someone and released him.

Neronha said, "That wasn't a setback.

We chased a lead, we got a tip.

We looked into it, we cleared the guy."

So there's maybe a little bit of disagreement there, but I think in terms of how he's speaking to the community and sort of projecting, it's safe to go to school, it's safe to continue your holiday plans, because as far as we know, there is not, again, the guy hasn't been sighted since Saturday.

And so there's sort of this, I guess, tension between like, do you stay in your home and do nothing and stay home from school and stay home from work?

Or do you go live your life because we don't know whether there's even a danger?

And I think he's doing a decent job of projecting that in a sort of, he speaks clearly and he's pretty calm.

- And there is, you know, I have to say on Monday, when I went to the Brown gym and I went to my office on campus and then I walked around, I didn't feel as much of a police presence as I thought that I would.

And then that was corrected by, you know, the next day.

- Yeah.

I was gonna say.

- And there are Providence police officers actually right on, right where the building is, right everywhere around it, but also in the perimeter area.

And I think that they have figured out the balance of covering the whole city.

And I will say just a credit to the Providence Police Department, there was actually an incident, totally separate, at one of the restaurants in the neighborhood I was in on Saturday night, and I thought, "They're never gonna get to come here.

They're all at Brown."

- Exactly.

- And in fact, they showed up and they took care of it and they resolved it.

And I was impressed with that thinking of- - [Jim] They diverted one of the 400 cops that they had.

- They did!

And I thought, "This is never gonna," and they did come and it turns out this person had been disturbing downtown businesses.

So they had been tracking the person.

The point is that they had managed to cover, and I think that with Colonel Perez and the mayor, they've gotta think about that too.

They've gotta think about general public safety.

- Other stuff going on.

- But I think the risk, there's a risk for the mayor in some ways that I think is unique in that people trust Brett Smiley already.

And so if he says, "I think you can go out," people believe him and we'll go out.

And that's a lot to shoulder, I think.

- I totally agree, and I think that's why on Sunday, people were breathing a sigh of relief because the mayor came out and he said, "We have someone."

- A person of interest.

- A person of interest.

Now, they didn't charge the person, they didn't say this is definitely the gunman or anything like that.

But certainly, he projected a sense of relief that was felt by people throughout the city because their mayor told them that they could breathe a little bit easier.

And so that was a huge disappointment when it turned out no, the manhunt is still on and now he's still ongoing.

- But do you think he had a choice?

Because Kash Patel, the director of the FBI, I believe, you could tell me- - Oh, I'm not criticizing.

- Had already tweeted out that they caught the guy.

- Yeah.

- So there was almost nothing- - And then the president tweeted out because of that.

- Right, and then there was almost nothing.

- Well, the president tweeted because of the Brown, the president tweeted on Saturday that they got someone because Brown had put out an alert.

- That they had to retract.

- That they had someone and they retracted, which police said was because they did very briefly detain someone for questioning and then released.

- Wendy, you have a unique perspective, again, I use the word unique because you've taught at Barus and Holley.

- Yeah.

In that room.

Yeah.

- So just take us inside that building for people.

I mean, we've heard about it on the news, what it's like, and you've been in the building where the shooting was- - So the building.

- In the room where the shooting was.

- The building is really a part of a complex and it's the older part of a building and then there's a brand new building that was built to the side and above it.

So layers above it, floors above it, and that, so there's a couple of classrooms, some are 30 person classrooms, some are 150 person.

This was what we call a tiered seating, like a movie theater, lecture hall.

So when you're in that lecture hall, there is an exit at the bottom and then there's a big sort of big scientific table that you can sort of hide behind, which is where some of the students hid.

Then there's like, anything else, seats on the side, seats in the middle, seats on the other side.

The seats in the middle are longer.

There's more of them in the middle.

So you can imagine if somebody comes in from the side or the back that, you know, you could probably get out pretty easily from the sides, but the middle would be a more difficult place to escape from.

- Can you also enter from the top of sort of the amphitheater?

- Yes.

Yeah, yeah.

My understanding is that the gunman came in from what we call the back, which would be the top of the room.

- Mm.

- And so we don't know at what point the gunman, where in that room the gunman started to shoot, and it's just terribly unfortunate that two students were killed and so many others were injured.

But you also have to think to yourself, there were, by all accounts, between 40 and 60 students in the room at the time.

So this is another curiosity about this particular mass shooting.

- All right, so we're gonna again give the caveat that we're taping this on a Thursday, so we're not sure, by the time you watch this, hopefully something will happen.

But stay tuned.

All right, and follow Steph's reporting.

With the 2026 general assembly session right around the corner, the governor and legislative leaders are talking about their priorities.

With a structural deficit, though, and uncertainty about federal cuts, how much will get done is anyone's guess.

Wendy, let me begin with you.

They all sat down with reporters, before the Brown thing happened over the weekend.

Governor McKee seizing on affordability.

To me, the thing I took out of his interview was to eliminate state taxes on social security, which they've been talking about for years.

- Well, they have.

I mean, under Nick Mattiello, actually, they've carved out a certain income level, I believe it's 36,000 or something or other, where you wouldn't pay taxes on the first, you know, 36,000 or something, for social security.

I think the number is in there.

So now it's whatever you make on social security, you're not gonna be taxed as income from your social security benefit.

That matters to people in Rhode Island, particularly on some constrained budgets.

Our neighbor, New Hampshire, doesn't tax on any retirement income.

So if you take out from your 401k, you don't pay state income taxes on that.

So I think that's something where we're starting to compete with other states.

And the idea is to keep people with resources in the state as long as possible.

- And that dovetails into the tax the wealthy.

- Yes.

- Which is what they talked about last session.

And I think that Speaker Joe Shekarchi was probably smart to keep that in his brass pocket to say, "We don't know what the federal cuts are gonna be.

We're facing a structural deficit."

But I think the legislative leaders, Val Lawson and Frank Ciccone said that they, that's something that they would favor, probably not surprised.

- Yeah, I mean, the taxing the multi-million dollar homes is what they did last year.

And then this year now they're talking about should we do an additional tax on the wealthy?

I mean, listen, Massachusetts now has a millionaire's tax.

There's a fear that people would move away, would move outta the state if they get this, if there's an additional tax on the wealthy.

I think a lot of people are already making sure they spend six months and a day in Florida so that they don't have to pay income tax.

So people who want to avoid paying income tax have probably, again, found a way to do that, whether they're doing the Florida half the year or what have you.

So I'm not sure, I can't say whether all of our rich people would move out if there was a tax on the wealthy, but I think that's something we're really gonna be watching this session.

- And that's a question that in Massachusetts, is the jury out as to whether people have fled?

Some people say some people have left, the wealthy.

And some have not.

- My understanding is that they have not found some massive population exodus and that they've made more than a billion dollars or something on this tax.

The question you have to ask is, we already have a very large budget for our population size and our geographic size in Rhode Island.

And you wanna say to yourself, if we have a structural deficit, why aren't we cutting?

Why aren't we trying to make programs more efficient rather than turning to yet more taxation?

And then people pay the taxes and say, "Where did the money go?"

So I think there's legitimate problems with this moment in time, saying to people, even if you're not a quote unquote "wealthy" person, the idea that the government wants to take more of your money, I just don't think that's gonna be popular.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And you know, it's interesting, when the governor asks all the agencies to put their budget together, he says, "I need you to cut X percent of your budget and give me a proposal."

Well, there was a proposal to cut funding for Headstart because there actually is some state funding in that.

It's mostly federal funding, but there's some state funding, and everyone, of course, saw it in the proposal and was up in arms and the governor said, "No, no, I'm not gonna do that.

I'm not gonna put that in the budget."

So it's, every single thing that they proposed to cut, there's an advocate on the other side saying, "Don't cut my program."

So it'll be interesting to see what they come up with.

- But there is a question of efficiency versus cuts, right?

So when you say cutting, do you need every single hiring slot you have?

And even if it's a vacant slot, can you not hire on that slot?

- Attrition.

Just let it go, right?

- Attrition.

- But also efficiency, we just saw, you know, another, a SNAP scandal, a $7 million fraud in Massachusetts on SNAP.

We saw the horrific fraud in Minnesota, which is, you know, millions and millions and millions of dollars.

So when I think people start to say, "Wait a minute, if you can't cut, can you make it more efficient?

Can you make sure that everybody who's receiving a benefit paid for by the state qualifies for that benefit?"

- You know, we've talked about this because, and I did a story on how much the legislature spent, and in the context of that, that was 2018, 2019, right before the pandemic, it was $9.4 billion.

Then we had all that influx of federal money that took it up to 13, 14.

And I remember Governor McKee in one of his debates with Ashley Kalus, they said, "Well look, once you flush all that federal money out, what's it gonna come down to?"

And he said, "I think maybe 11 and a half, 12 billion."

It's still 13, 14 billion, that money.

So it says to me they didn't follow what Joe Shekarchi said.

We need to make investments rather than spending.

They baked in a lot of long-term programs with that money and that's why we have a structural deficit now.

- Yes but the federal government, I mean, you know, we have so much (indistinct) money, but the federal government under Biden expanded what states could do with the money and actually have to do with the money.

So there's a lot of things that we do or we set up to do that the federal government said you had to do.

So in that sense, that's the catch 22 with the federal government and the Trump administration.

It's not just unfunded mandates, it's funded mandates.

And the Trump administration is now rolling so much of that back.

But if you are helping people and serving people, they're gonna continue to want that benefit.

And that's, I think, the position the leadership finds themselves in.

- And I think there's a lot of unknowns with, you know, Obamacare subsidies potentially going away and medical costs are going up.

Obviously, we're in a primary care shortage.

People want there to be more, you know, investments in healthcare.

So I think it's a sort of tenuous situation, if you're the budget writers right now, - Wendy, that's a national issue, but it also affects us here locally.

They haven't been able to get a deal on the subsidies for the Affordable Care Act.

How do you see that going into the new year?

And particularly with the midterms looming, in red and blue states.

- So Obamacare is so complicated, but the subsidies that are at issue here are tax breaks for people in what you would call sort of middle income levels.

When you are low income enough, you go on Medicaid.

So that was the big Medicaid expansion in Obamacare.

So you're looking at people who don't qualify for Medicaid but you know, make decent money, but find the premiums to be very expensive.

So you can write them off, a percentage of them off, as a tax deduction or tax credit.

So now you're not paying taxes on the income you're spending for the premium.

And that's what the Republicans object to.

They don't, they will keep 'em as long as the income threshold is lowered.

They think too many people who can pay full shouldn't be getting the tax break.

That's the fight in Washington.

And the problem for red state senators is that a higher proportion of red state senators are already on Obamacare.

- Right.

- Or Medicaid.

And two, are taking this tax break.

So how do they go back to their constituents and say, "We're taking it away from you."

- And that's what happened in the town halls in 2016, 'cause they said, you know, they said we're gonna repeal and replace.

Well they never did the replace, you know, either one.

- Right.

- And there were people in Louisiana saying, "What do you mean you're gonna take away my healthcare?"

- Right, 2018, that was 2018.

- Right, when Trump began, when he first started.

- If the middle income people that Wendy mentioned that are not gonna get this tax break anymore, decide not to have health insurance, that's where we run into a problem.

Because then when they go to the ER, they're still gonna be served, but they don't have insurance- - And their premiums are not.

- And then everybody else is- - Helping.

- Right.

Their premiums aren't going towards it, and then also, the rest of us subsidize that healthcare.

- Yeah, and the Republicans are saying, "Well, we don't wanna pay insurance companies," you're not paying insurance companies.

You have people who are getting insurance from insurance companies that participate in the exchange and then they're getting a tax break for it.

But we're not doing direct payments to insurance companies through Obamacare in that way.

- All right, quickly, outrage and kudos, do you have either one this week?

- I am, for this week, I have to say, as a member of the Providence and Brown community, the kudos to all of the first responders, were just extraordinary in responding to the Brown shooting and particularly Rhode Island Hospital and the trauma care unit.

I mean, we have to be just really grateful that they were as good as they were on that night.

- I totally agree with Wendy and I'll give an outrage, which is the misinformation being spread on the internet.

People, it is unacceptable to be putting people's names out there because you think they might be the suspect.

It's irresponsible.

If you have information about the suspect, you can call police and they'll run down your tip.

But there's no excuse for spreading misinformation online.

- Yeah, but it's the age we're in, it's the keyboard warriors, right?

You never know who they are.

They set up fake accounts that they hide behind.

It's countless.

- Right, they don't have names and they could ruin people's with the stuff they're putting out there.

- Yeah, exactly.

Wendy and Steph, really appreciate it.

Really good half hour.

- Thank you.

- Thank you so much.

Thank you for joining us.

Be sure and check us out on Facebook, X, Instagram, and on the Ocean State Media YouTube channel.

We'll see you next time here on "Lively."

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