Robert Dorgan, 56, opened fire in the stands of a Pawtucket, Rhode Island, ice rink on Monday afternoon, killing his ex-wife, Rhonda Dorgan, and their son, Aidan, before turning the gun on himself. Three others, the grandparents of the Dorgan children and a family friend, were critically injured and remain hospitalized.
Police believe Dorgan was intentionally targeting his own family. Investigators are still probing a motive.
Court documents obtained by WPRI now reveal the fractured history behind the massacre, including Rhonda Dorgan's 2020 divorce filing, which cited Robert Dorgan's "narcissistic + personality disorder traits" and his "gender reassignment surgery" as reasons for ending the marriage. She later amended the filing to cite "irreconcilable differences which have caused the immediate breakdown of the marriage." The divorce was finalized in 2021.
According to the New York Post, the court filings paint a picture of escalating domestic turmoil. In 2020, Robert Dorgan showed up at the North Providence Police Department claiming his father-in-law had threatened to "have him murdered by an Asian street gang if he did not move out of the residence." He also alleged his father-in-law had used a slur for transgender people, saying no such individual was "going to stay in my house."
Multiple family court battles followed in the years between the divorce and the shooting. Specific details of those cases have not been made public.
Robert Dorgan's daughter, spotted leaving the Pawtucket police station after the shooting, spoke to reporters in blunt terms:
"He shot my family, and he's dead now."
She added that her father "has mental health issues" and was "very sick."
A man with documented personality disorder traits, a history of erratic police reports, and years of contentious family court proceedings walked into a public venue and executed members of his own family. That is the core of this story. It is a horrific act of domestic violence.
It is also a story that involves a transgender shooter. And in the current media landscape, that fact creates a familiar discomfort.
When a shooter fits a convenient narrative, the press has no trouble connecting identity to ideology, motive to biography. Every detail gets scrutinized, every social media post becomes evidence of a broader cultural sickness. But when the shooter is transgender, the machinery suddenly shifts into reverse. Caution replaces curiosity. Nuance is discovered overnight. The same outlets that would spend weeks dissecting a manifesto will instead remind you that motive is "still under investigation" and quietly move on.
No serious person should claim that Dorgan's gender reassignment surgery caused the shooting. That is not the point. The point is the asymmetry. The point is that the media applies one standard of scrutiny to one set of killers and an entirely different standard to another.
The Nashville Covenant School shooting in 2023 produced months of this dynamic. Officials fought to suppress the shooter's writings. Media coverage handled the killer's transgender identity like radioactive material. The instinct was to protect a category, not to pursue a story.
Here, the facts are what they are:
Those facts deserve the same honest examination that any other set of biographical details would receive if the shooter's identity were more convenient for progressive narratives.
Two people are dead. Three more are fighting for their lives. A family's GoFundMe page identifies the victims as Rhonda and Aidan Dorgan. Police have not yet officially released their names.
Whatever investigators ultimately determine about motive, the pattern here is tragically familiar. A bitter divorce. Custody disputes. Escalating grievance. A man who felt the world owed him something it refused to give. The venue changes. The weapon changes. The grievance at the center rarely does.
The daughter's words carry the weight of someone who saw this coming and couldn't stop it. Her father was "very sick." He had "mental health issues." She did not reach for ideology or politics. She reached for the simplest, most devastating truth available to her.
Rhonda Dorgan tried to leave. She filed the paperwork. She amended the language. She got the divorce finalized. She did what society tells people in dangerous situations to do. She still ended up in the stands of an ice rink on a Monday afternoon, watching her child's hockey game, in the last moments of her life.
No policy debate changes that. No framing softens it.
But the least we owe the dead is honesty about who killed them and the full, unedited context of how it happened. Every time.