A Marine veteran with a concealed carry permit teamed up with a Massachusetts State Police trooper and stopped an active shooter on Cambridge’s Memorial Drive Monday afternoon.
The gunman had already fired more than 50 rounds at rush-hour traffic before the trooper and Marine combined to put him down.
Tyler Brown, 46, of Boston, walked down the center of Memorial Drive around 1:30 p.m. carrying an assault-style rifle and opened fire on passing vehicles in a random attack. Two men in separate vehicles were shot by Brown and are hospitalized with life-threatening injuries. Dozens more innocent people were forced to run for their lives as Brown paced back and forth, reloading his rifle and firing at cars again and again.
“He’s shooting all over the place,” one witness told CBS Boston. “It wasn’t like a regular gunfire. It was like pow, pow, pow, pow, pow.”
He had fired between 50 and 60 rounds by the time it ended by the State Police trooper, assisted by the unnamed Marine veteran who was legally carrying a firearm.
“Both that trooper and that civilian, rather than going in one direction, went towards the suspect with their weapons to try to end that situation,” Middlesex County District Attorney Marian Ryan said at a press conference Monday night. “Both the civilian and the trooper fired their weapons and that suspect was struck multiple times in the extremities.”
The trooper’s cruiser was struck by a bullet during the exchange. Brown is in the intensive care unit of a Boston hospital. The Marine veteran, whose identity is being protected at his request, was sitting in traffic when the shooting began and rushed into action.
The criminal record Brown brought to Memorial Drive tells a story of a failed Democratic system that keeps releasing violent criminals onto the streets.
Court records show Brown tried to kill Boston Police officers in 2020 but received only a five-to-six year sentence. His parole officer called him Monday at noon, just 90 minutes before the shooting began, and immediately sensed something was wrong.
Brown had been released from McLean Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Belmont, just three days earlier.
On that noon call, Brown told his parole officer “these people are gonna f**king pay” and “I’m not going back to prison.” He claimed he had “committed murders in the past, some that he did not get caught for.”
Boston Police obtained a search warrant and pinged Brown’s phone near Memorial Drive at 1:21 p.m. Nine minutes later, he was walking down the middle of the street firing a rifle at cars in traffic.
Massachusetts Republicans wasted no time responding to the senseless violence.
“When our criminal justice system throws common sense out the window and allows dangerous, violent people to get out of prison quickly or early, it means innocent moms, dads, and kids may be killed,” gubernatorial candidate Tom Minogue said said. “As Governor, I will keep communities safe by pushing to ensure that repeat offenders like Tyler Brown are not given lenient sentences or parole.”
Thankfully, a good guy with a gun was there to intervene when the Democrat-run legal system failed.
Warning: This video is graphic —
NEWS: The career criminal g*nman who opened fire on Memorial Drive in Cambridge, indiscriminately shooting at passing cars, has been identified as 46-year-old Tyler Brown.
Brown was also charged with the attempted mu*der of Boston police officers in 2020 — yet RADICAL Suffolk… pic.twitter.com/gUFKTxEy1R
— RedWave Press (@RedWavePress) May 12, 2026