On Monday, May 11, 2026, a man with a rifle walked down a busy street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and randomly fired dozens of shots, sending drivers running for their lives and leaving two men badly hurt, police said.
The man, identified as 46-year-old Tyler Brown of Boston, fired between 50 and 60 rounds from a rifle as he moved along Memorial Drive around 1:30 p.m., according to investigators.
He was later shot by a state trooper and a Marine veteran who stepped in. Brown was still in the hospital on Tuesday, along with two other men who he shot, and they were all listed in critical condition.
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| Tyler Brown |
Brandon Mansolf was driving when he suddenly saw cars swerve across the grass and cut to the other side of the road. At first, he thought it was just an angry driver, then he kept hearing pops. He got out to check on a coworker in the car ahead of him and saw the gunman standing in the street.
When the man raised the rifle toward him, Mansolf dove back into his car and crouched behind the dashboard. A bullet later hit his radiator, and coolant spilled all over the road.
Thankfully, a state trooper pulled up next to him, got out, and moved behind the cruiser, positioning himself right in front of Mansolf’s driver’s side mirror.
The trooper and the gunman exchanged fire while Mansolf stayed as low as he could, and when he finally looked up, the gunman was on the ground. “Blood everywhere. shell casings all in front of my car, his car,” Mansolf said
Another driver, Todd Czubek, said the sounds did not make sense at first until the shots came so fast and so close together that there was no question of what they were hearing.
“It was just like, ‘This sounds like gunfire’ and then he had a large rifle, an automatic weapon,” Czubek told CBS News Boston.
Czubek said the man was shooting randomly, spraying the area and firing into the air before he moved into the road where cars were stopped in both directions.
People jumped out of their vehicles and ran, and Czubek did the same. “You never think, anybody, that you’ll be involved in it and then it happens,” he said. “It’s crazy.”
From his apartment window, Joseph Minino-Rodriguez heard the gunfire and called 911. He watched as the gunman approached a car, hit its window several times, and looked frustrated and angry while speaking to the people inside.
The man did not shoot into that car, and according to Minino-Rodriguez, the whole thing looked like a video game. He got the impression the gunman was trying to stop traffic for a certain amount of time before he started firing. “It was a good amount of people,” he said. “He thought it was a perfect time to just start letting it go.”
Witnesses said the man was screaming, but they could not understand what he was saying. He walked up and down the street, re-racking the rifle and shooting at passing cars.
One woman described the sound as nothing like regular gunfire, just “pow, pow, pow, pow, pow.” Another woman said she simply ran when she heard the shots, and later someone helped her into a nearby building because she was shaking so badly. “I was running for my life,” she said.
At a news conference Monday night, Middlesex District Attorney Marian Ryan said some drivers were found hiding under their cars.
At least a dozen vehicles were struck by gunfire. Memorial Drive was shut down for about nine hours as investigators worked the scene, and police were trying to locate drivers who had abandoned their cars so the vehicles can be returned.
Ryan said hundreds of witnesses will be interviewed, and anyone who has video of the shooting is urged to contact Massachusetts State Police.
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