PAWTUCKET, R.I. — A shooting inside a Rhode Island hockey rink Monday left three people dead, including the shooter, three others injured and the two high school teams playing fleeing the ice as it all unfolded.
Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves told reporters that someone helped bring a swift end to the violent scene Monday afternoon by intervening and trying to subdue the shooter, who was at an arena to watch a family member’s hockey game. The shooter died from an apparent self-inflicted gun wound, she said, noting that authorities were still investigating.
“It appears that this was a targeted event, that it may be a family dispute,” she said.
Goncalves identified the shooter as Robert Dorgan, who she said also went by the name Roberta Esposito and was born in 1969. Goncalves did not provide details about the ages of those who were killed, though she said it appeared that both victims were adults. The three people injured were hospitalized in critical condition as of Monday night.
The shooting took place in the stands at Dennis M. Lynch Arena in Pawtucket, a few miles outside Providence.
The game between the two high school teams was livestreamed. Several gunshots could be heard on video that later appeared on social media as players and coaches raced off the ice on the opposite end of the rink. Other video showed some players, with skates still on, taking cover in nearby stores.
“I was on the ice, and I thought it was balloons at first,” Olin Lawrence, a goalie on one of the teams, told WJAR, the NBC affiliate in Rhode Island. “It was pop, pop, pop. And I thought it was balloons. But it just kept going and it was actually gunshots. And after the gunshots, me and my teammates ran right to the locker room, and we just bunkered up. We pressed against the door and just tried to stay safe down in there.
“It was very scary. We were very nervous.”
Outside the arena, tearful families and high school hockey players still in uniform could be seen hugging before they boarded a bus to leave the area. Roads surrounding the arena were shut down as a heavy police presence remained before being reopened late Monday afternoon.
As part of a social media post, the Boston Bruins said they were “deeply saddened that a place meant for celebrating hockey and bringing people together was touched by this violence.”
A statement from the Boston Bruins: pic.twitter.com/7orJgA3myz
— Boston Bruins (@NHLBruins) February 16, 2026
The Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics and Revolution all issued statements of support.
The shooting comes nearly two months after Rhode Island was rocked by a separate gun violence tragedy at Brown University, where a gunman killed two students and injured nine others. That shooter went on to also fatally shoot a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor. Authorities later found Claudio Neves Valente, 48, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a New Hampshire storage facility.
“Fortunately, the two incidents are not related, but it is very tragic,” Pawtucket Mayor Don Grebien said. “These are high school kids, they were doing an event, they were playing with fans watching, and it turned into this.”
Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.
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