Politics

Violent Repeat Offender Left Psych Ward Days Before Allegedly Shooting Up Busy Massachusetts Street

Tyler Brown poses for a mugshot after police arrested him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on May 11, 2026. (Image courtesy of the Middlesex District Attorney's Office)

The suspect charged with randomly shooting people on a Massachusetts street on Monday was in a psychiatric facility three days prior, court records say.

Tyler Brown’s parole officer learned he was using drugs and acting strangely after being released from McLean Hospital in Belmont on Friday, a Massachusetts state trooper wrote in a Tuesday complaint. Brown is now accused of firing a rifle indiscriminately at drivers in Cambridge on Monday, hospitalizing two people.

Brown is a repeat offender with violent convictions dating back to at least 2014, the Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported. He received a five-to-six-year sentence that was lighter than prosecutors’ recommendations in a 2020 case after shooting at Boston police. Officers noted that he appeared “emotionally disturbed” in that incident as well, former Democratic Suffolk County District Attorney Rachael Rollins’ office said.

The hospital did not respond to the DCNF’s request for comment. Massachusetts’ court database does not yet list further case information for Brown. He is charged with armed assault with intent to murder, carrying a gun without a license, assault and battery with a firearm and illegally possessing a large-capacity firearm, the complaint shows.

A co-resident at Brown’s home “told the parole officer [early on Monday] to meet with Brown because ‘he’s off his rocker’ and had been getting high all night before,” the state trooper wrote. The parole officer also allegedly received a Facetime video call from Brown in which he was “waving around a semi-automatic rifle” in someone’s kitchen and saying “these people are gonna fucking pay” and “I’m not going back to prison.”

Retired Suffolk Superior Court Judge Janet Sanders, who gave Brown his light sentence in 2020, told one local media outlet over the past week that she has “no memory of this case” and another that the sentence “was not a failure of the justice system.”

“It was the proper functioning of the justice system,” Sanders told WBZ-TV. Former Republican Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift appointed Sanders to the state’s Superior Court in 2001.

Sanders acknowledged a degree of uncertainty about her sentence in a 2020 recording obtained by NBC10 Boston.

“Mr. Brown, I do realize that I’m taking a chance on you,” she said, according to the outlet. “When people stand up, experienced police officers and probation officers, and they tell me, ‘This guy is a danger to the community,’ I hear that and it gives me… you know, I can’t look into a crystal ball and figure out what’s going to happen once you get out. But I do understand that I’m taking a risk here.”