A gunman opened fire in the stands of a high school hockey tournament in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on Monday afternoon, killing two adults and critically wounding three others before turning the gun on himself.

The shooting unfolded inside the Dennis M. Lynch Arena, roughly ten minutes outside Providence, in front of a crowd of spectators that included high school students and their families.

Police say the attack was targeted and stemmed from a dispute within a single family. They are not searching for additional suspects.

The gunman died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The three others struck by gunfire were hospitalized in critical condition, according to the Daily Mail. A live stream of the game captured approximately 12 gunshots.

What We Know And What Officials Got Wrong

The tournament had kicked off at 2 p.m. on President's Day. The game on the ice featured a co-op team of Coventry and Johnston against a co-op squad from St. Raphael, PCD, North Providence, and North Smithfield schools. The arena was full of the kind of crowd you'd expect at a holiday high school hockey event — parents, siblings, classmates.

Then came the gunfire.

In the immediate aftermath, Pawtucket Mayor Donald Grebien told the public that one of the victims was a young girl. Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves later corrected that statement, confirming both deceased victims were adults. No explanation has been offered for the discrepancy. In a situation this grave — where families across the region were scrambling to locate their children — putting out inaccurate information about a child victim is not a minor error. It's the kind of thing that accelerates panic.

The identities of the two adults killed, the three critically injured, and the gunman himself have not been publicly released. Goncalves confirmed that the confrontation involved one family and that the investigation remains ongoing.

The FBI's Boston field office responded to the scene but noted that no request for FBI assistance had been made. Their statement was measured:

"We stand ready to assist our partners at the Pawtucket Police Department and @RIStatePolice with any and all resources they need."

The bureau also made clear there was no imminent threat to public safety but urged the public to avoid the area.

A State That Can't Catch Its Breath

Rhode Island is the smallest state in the country by land area — 1,214 square miles, home to about 1.11 million people. It is not a place accustomed to mass shootings. And yet this is the second high-profile shooting to rock the state in just two months.

In December, a gunman named Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente opened fire inside Brown University's Barus and Holley Building at the School of Engineering. He fired 40 rounds, striking 11 people. Two students — Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov — were killed. Nine others were injured. Police and the FBI spent days searching for the suspect. Brown University canceled all remaining classes, exams, papers, and projects for the semester and told students they could leave campus.

Two mass shootings in a state this small, this close together, create something worse than a statistical anomaly. It creates a psychological wound. Families in Rhode Island now have reason to think twice about sending their kids to a hockey game or an engineering lecture. That's not a policy debate. That's a reality people are living with right now.

The "Targeted" Question

Police have characterized this as a targeted attack connected to a family dispute. If that holds — and the investigation is still ongoing — it changes the calculus from random mass violence to something more specific and, in a grim way, more preventable. Family disputes that escalate to lethal violence almost always have a trail. Restraining orders ignored, prior calls to police, warning signs that someone close saw and either reported or didn't.

None of that information has been released yet. The Pawtucket Police Department has not responded to press inquiries beyond the chief's initial statements. What we do know is that whoever this gunman was, he chose to carry out a family vendetta in a public arena full of children watching a hockey game. He chose an audience. He chose spectacle.

That choice — to bring private violence into a space filled with kids — deserves a category of moral condemnation that goes beyond whatever domestic grievance preceded it.

What Comes Next

Live stream footage of the shooting has already begun circulating online. Both Mayor Grebien and Chief Goncalves acknowledged its existence. In 2026, this is the grim rhythm: tragedy, footage, virality, commentary, and then nothing that changes the underlying conditions.

The immediate questions are straightforward. Who was the gunman? What was the family dispute? Were there prior warnings? Did any system — law enforcement, courts, family services — have a chance to intervene before Monday afternoon?

The harder questions sit underneath those. How do communities protect public gatherings without turning every youth sporting event into a security checkpoint? How does a state this small absorb two mass shootings in two months without losing something essential about how people live?

Three people remain in critical condition. Two families are planning funerals. And a generation of high school hockey players in Rhode Island just learned that the stands aren't safe — not from a stranger, but from someone settling a score in the worst possible place.

The arena was supposed to be about the game. On Monday, it became about everything the game is supposed to let kids forget.