CNN anchor John Berman interviewed his own son about Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University.
A shooter killed two people and wounded nine others after opening fire during a final exam review in one of the Ivy League school’s classrooms on Saturday afternoon.
The shooting sent the campus into lockdown into the night while police launched a manhunt for the gunman. A person of interest was taken into custody early Sunday morning.
Reporting from Providence, Rhode Island, on Sunday afternoon, Berman, 53, revealed, “One of those people, who spent the night sheltering in place overnight, happens to be my son, Joe Berman.”
Joe, who is not a Brown student but was visiting a friend, explained that he was signing in at a library when a distressed woman alerted the librarian to the shooting.
“Right in front of us, talking to a different library clerk was a woman who was very sad on the phone. Her friend had just seen someone lying on the ground and said they had to call 911,” Joe said.
“And what happened immediately after was the librarian said they gotta lock the doors. Everyone should go inside, get away from windows, and just follow those people trying to get to safer spaces.”
John said, “And you, thankfully, decided to call us.”
“I mean, it’s a scary situation,” Joe said. “It doesn’t really cross your mind when you see it on the news all the time. And I suppose I’ve become desensitized towards it. But when it happens to you, it’s—Even if you’re in a different building, like five minutes away, you know people, I have friends from my high school here, my best friend, a bunch of his friends know people. And it just it feels a lot closer to home when it happens.”
Joe said they spent seven hours sheltering in the library before police bused them to another building. The shooting, which began just after 4 p.m., occurred in the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building.
“Obviously you’ve grown up, school shootings happened, you’ve seen me run out to go cover them,” John said. “Was there a moment you were like, ‘This is all happening right around me?’”
“I think it really hit once we left,” Joe said. “You see all these cop cars, all these different law enforcement vehicles everywhere. And then once you get out of this protected zone, it’s just silence. And I think that’s really when it hit me.”
“When you called us—and again, thank you so much for calling us—You sounded so calm. Were you trying to make us not worry?” John asked.
“I mean, I think it’s any son’s job to make their parents not worry. But in this situation, I felt very safe,” Joe replied, noting that the Brown Police Department responded “very fast.”
He added, “I didn’t want to spread any fear onto you guys.”
The Bermans shared a hug at the end of the interview, and John signed off by saying, “That was Joe Berman, good guy, known him for a long time.”
The person of interest in the shooting has been identified as Benjamin Erickson, 24, multiple law enforcement sources told NBC News and The Washington Post on Sunday.
Erickson was taken into custody at a hotel about 15 minutes from the Brown campus in Providence, the Post reported. He has not been named as a suspect or charged in connection with the attack that killed two people and injured nine others.
