Laramie grad, yards away from Brown shooting, now home and safe

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Brown University freshman David Novogrodsky had planned to be in the seven-story Barus and Holley engineering and physics building on the Providence, Rhode Island campus Saturday when a gunman burst into a room, killed two students and injured nine others.

The Laramie High School graduate and mechanical engineering major is in the building almost every day, he said in an interview Tuesday. He had received an invitation to be there on Saturday to work on the pedals of a Formula race car being designed for a college competition.

Instead, he went with friends to a math study session in his dorm.

“I just got lucky,” Novogrodsky said. “I would have been there from like 10 to five o’clock.”

Shortly after 4 p.m., a person opened fire on students in an economics review session in a room on the building’s first floor, according to news reports. Police have released video footage of a man, who remains at large, whom they believe is connected to the incident.

Novogrodsky was about four blocks away at a Shake Shack, chomping on a burger with a buddy. After, he planned to meet another friend at the Science Library, right next to Barus and Holley. It was about 4:15 p.m.

“My [other] friend … because I told him I was there … came, like, sprinting into the Shake Shack,” Novogrodsky said. That fellow student had been in Barus and Holley.

“And he was like, ‘Dude! I just heard like, 12 shots fired in this building!’

“He was super-rattled,” Novogrodsky said. “I could see the fear in his eyes. He told me what was going on, and then ran back to his dorm.”

Novogrodsky and his buddy at Shake Shack were perhaps 300 yards away from the shooting. “We saw 20 cop cars go down the street,” he said.

The two ran into another friend who had an apartment nearby, and they all fled there. Eating the Shake Shack burger was crucial.

“We sheltered a place for the rest of the night,” he said. “Sixteen hours.”

Away from risk?

When Novogrodsky left Laramie and a state full of firearms this summer for nearly all-blue Providence, he thought he had left gun culture behind. “I actually felt coming from Wyoming, I’ve gotten away from a lot of that risk,” he said.

“It’s always felt like a very safe campus,” he said of Brown. “I’ve walked back from libraries at 4:30 in the morning — haven’t had any issues.”

He learned about active shooter dangers in Laramie.

“Every year, we go through drills,” he said. “Hide at the corner first, then run. As a last resort, throw chairs or whatever you have to.

“But there wasn’t any training like that, at least not enough for it to be memorable for me, from Brown.”

Novogrodsky knew of Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, one of the two students who was murdered. Ella Cook also died in the shooting. Novogrodsky’s friend, who rushed into Shake Shack, is tight with a student who was wounded.

“He’s one of the nine who survived,” Novogrodsky said. “That was just scary to think … three inches … slightly different condition[s] and the guy who I had lunch with three weeks ago wouldn’t be with us anymore.”

Novogrodsky and his friends hunkered down in the apartment, blocks from the shooting. He didn’t notice anything amiss on the way to his lockdown. The shooter is believed to have left Barus and Holley to the east. Shake Shack is to the west.

“I was frantically checking my Instagram stories,” Novogrodsky said. “The first people to say there’s shots fired on campus [were] on Slack, so everybody was checking that.”

He messaged friends. Officials were warning students not to phone one another in case a call set off a hidden student’s ringtone that a shooter might hear.

“They were texting us saying ‘silence your phones, turn off lights, keep doors locked.’”

Messages went out. Students shared group chats. Novogrodsky’s club hockey coach messaged the team.

“Almost immediately, people were rallying to each other, trying to support each other, making sure everyone was OK.”

Then they waited.

“We heard all the news helicopters above us all night, cops and reporters down on the street and everything.”

Every person was smarter

As a junior at Laramie, Novogrodsky was ready to go to college.

“I was so excited, and it did not disappoint when I got there,” he said of Brown. “The whole New England atmosphere is just so different.”

In Wyoming, there were a couple of students in his class who were dedicated to learning. “I was one of a smaller percentage of kids who, like, truly cared about school,” he said.

“Getting to Brown, every single person was there to push themselves, learn as much as they can,” he said. “It’s so nice getting to the environment where I felt like everyone just had the same kind of drive and motivation. I felt like every person was smarter than the next.”

It was, he said, “one of the best five months of my life.”

When the students emerged from their shelters after the lockdown, there was an eerie silence across the campus and town. Students united.

“Everybody had the same mindset — if you need anything, I’m here for you,” Novogrodsky said, “and we still need to get through this together.”

Security on campus is going to increase a lot, he predicted.

“We’re probably gonna have to swipe in [to] every building, into almost every room,” he said. “I hope that Brown takes those initiatives pretty proactively in this winter break, because anybody could walk into Barus and Holley.”

In the aftermath, he has a message for Wyoming.

“This happens when you let gun control be as lax as it has been,” he said. “There’s a difference between the guns that people use for hunting and keep in their safe the rest of the year,” he said, and handguns and other firearms.

“It’s clear that gun control needs to change,” he said. “Whoever did this didn’t realize they just poked the bear on the most socially active campus in the country.”