A 56-year-old father opened fire at a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, ice rink during a high school hockey game Monday afternoon, killing two family members, critically injuring three others, and then turning the gun on himself. The shooter, Robert Dorgan, also identified as Roberta Esposito, had posted a threatening message on X just hours before the massacre.
The dead include the mother of Dorgan's hockey-playing son, a senior at North Providence High School, and the student athlete's sibling. Three others, described as two relatives and a family friend, remained in critical condition. Police had not publicly identified the victims at the time of reporting.
Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves addressed reporters after the shooting:
"It appears that this was a targeted event, that it may be a family dispute."
It was not immediately clear whether the mother killed was Dorgan's ex-wife, Rhonda Dorgan.
On Sunday evening, someone on X called trans Democratic Rep. Sarah McBride a man. The post involved actor Kevin Sorbo. Dorgan responded publicly with a message that now reads like a warning shot:
"Keep bashing us. But do not wonder why we Go BERSERK"
Less than 24 hours later, the New York Post reported, Dorgan walked into an ice rink full of families and children and started shooting.
Police said they are still probing the exact motive. Detectives were reviewing surveillance footage from inside the arena. But the timeline is what it is. A person posted a threat invoking violence in the context of trans-rights grievance, then carried out a mass shooting targeting family members the very next day.
Dorgan underwent gender reassignment surgery in 2020. That same year, Rhonda Dorgan filed for divorce. A court filing obtained by local outlet WPRI listed the grounds as "gender reassignment surgery, narcissistic + personality disorder traits." The divorce was finalized in 2021.
What followed were years of heated court disputes over Dorgan's identity. No specific details about those proceedings have been made public, but they paint a picture of a family in prolonged crisis, the kind that courts can document but rarely resolve.
A woman identified as Dorgan's daughter was spotted leaving the Pawtucket police station after the shooting. She told reporters plainly:
"He shot my family, and he's dead now."
She added that Dorgan "has mental health issues" and was "very sick."
Witnesses described a Good Samaritan, the father of another hockey player, who rushed toward the gunfire rather than away from it. He attempted to subdue Dorgan and, according to witnesses, managed to disarm him. But Dorgan had a backup firearm. The heroism was real. So was its limit.
Chief Goncalves hailed the man's courage. In a scene that should have held nothing more dangerous than a body check, an ordinary dad tried to do what instinct and decency demanded.
This shooting arrived just days after another: 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar, a transgender high school dropout in Canada, killed his own mother and stepbrother, then shot six others at his former school in one of Canada's deadliest mass shootings.
Two mass shootings. Two transgender shooters. Back to back.
The cultural establishment will spend the next week doing what it always does: warning against "misuse" of these facts, cautioning that correlation is not causation, and urging restraint in connecting dots that are, frankly, sitting on top of each other. They will frame any discussion of a pattern as bigotry. They will insist the real danger is the conversation itself.
But the question is not whether every transgender person is violent. Obviously not. The question is whether a cultural and medical framework that often accompanies severe mental health distress is getting the scrutiny it deserves, or whether ideological commitments have made that scrutiny impossible. When Dorgan's own daughter says her father was "very sick," and court documents reference narcissistic personality disorder traits alongside gender reassignment surgery, you don't have to be a diagnostician to recognize that something was profoundly wrong long before Monday afternoon.
The left has spent years insisting that gender transition is purely therapeutic, that questioning it is violence, and that anyone who resists the narrative is responsible for harm against trans individuals. Dorgan's X post operated on exactly that logic: you bash us, so don't wonder when we snap. It reframed the shooter as the victim before the first shot was fired.
That framing is not just wrong. It is dangerous. It provides a moral architecture for violence by casting the perpetrator as the oppressed party striking back. And when the bodies are real, the framework collapses under its own weight.
Police are still investigating. The surveillance footage may clarify the sequence of events inside the rink. The relationships between Dorgan and each victim may shed light on whether this was purely domestic or whether the trans-rights grievance expressed online played a motivating role.
But families in Pawtucket already know everything they need to know. They brought their kids to a hockey game. Two people came home in body bags. Three more may not recover.
A high school rink in Rhode Island is now a crime scene. The stick tape and Zamboni marks share the floor with evidence markers. Somewhere, a teenage hockey player just lost his mother and sibling because his father chose carnage over whatever shred of humanity remained.
No manifesto makes that legible. No grievance makes it forgivable.
