Pawtucket, Rhode Island , 17 February (H.S.): A gunman unleashed pandemonium at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena on Monday afternoon, February 16, 2026, during a high school hockey game, slaying two victims and himself in a targeted fusillade authorities attribute to a festering family vendetta, leaving three others in critical condition amid the echoes of shattering ice and frantic screams.

Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves, confronting a phalanx of journalists outside the cordoned venue—a nexus of youth athletics mere miles north of Providence—confirmed the toll at approximately 2:00 p.m., as gunfire erupted within the crowded rink teeming with players, kin, and spectators, precipitating a frenzied exodus and instantaneous lockdown.

One fatality transpired at the scene alongside the assailant's demise—presumed self-inflicted pending autopsy—while four gunshot survivors were rushed to proximate hospitals, their vital signs teetering as trauma units mobilized with unyielding urgency.

Eyewitnesses depicted a maelstrom of terror: high school athletes, still sheathed in pads and jerseys, huddled on the frost-laced ice for cover as volleys reverberated; anguished parents clasped in desperate huddles before herding onto evacuation buses, while arterial roads flanking Andrew D. Ferland Way ossified under a colossal police cordon, helicopters whirring sentinel overhead in the twilight gloom.

Chief Goncalves vouchsafed the episode's domestic genesis, obviating any ambient peril—no additional suspects at large—yet parried queries on the perpetrator's ingress with armament or antecedent portents, as federal adjuncts from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives buttressed local sleuths in sifting surveillance spools, ballistic casings, and witness litanies.

Victim identities remain shrouded pending kin notification, though St. Raphael Academy disavowed casualties among its cohort, and Governor Dan McKee decried the atrocity as a horrific blight upon Rhode Island's communal fabric.

This cataclysm engulfs Pawtucket—a bastion of 80,000 proximate the Massachusetts pale, lionized erstwhile for Hasbro's aegis and whimsically Mr. Potato Head-emblazoned plates—in paroxysms of grief, eclipsing the Ocean State's historically subdued gun violence ledger with its intrusion into a juvenile sporting sanctum.

Forensic excavators now plumb the assailant's provenance, scrutinizing relational schisms that metastasized into lethality, even as community elders implore equanimity amid the evidentiary churn; the rink, erstwhile a coliseum of youthful vigor, transmutes into a forensic reliquary, its precincts etched indelibly by this familial inferno's sanguinary imprimatur.

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Hindusthan Samachar / Jun Sarkar