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State leaders urge Rhode Islanders to get a REAL ID

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State leaders urge Rhode Islanders to get a REAL ID


State leaders are giving a reminder about the deadline to get a Real ID on Tuesday.

The deadline to get one is May 2025, but the DMV said don’t wait until the last minute.

Soon if you are flying and over 18 you will have to one if you don’t have a passport.

Real IDs are a federal mandate that proves to the DMV who you are.

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The upgrade is free, if you apply for it when your license is already up for renewal, but you will need to bring a list of documents.

Those include a passport, birth certificate, and proof of residency. You’ll also need proof of any name changes.

TSA and DMV Administrator Bud Craddock will be at the airport on Tuesday to remind everyone about the upcoming deadline and How you can get one.

“You have to come into the DMV or AAA. AAA can also do the Real ID upgrade. First licenses always have to come through the DMV but upgrades and renewals can come through AAA if you are an AAA member,” Craddock said.

You can find a full list of what you need on the DMV website.

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What we know about the Rhode Island hockey game shooter

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What we know about the Rhode Island hockey game shooter



Police have identified the suspect accused of killing two people and critically injuring three others at an ice rink in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

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Police have identified the suspect accused of killing two people and critically injuring three others in a Feb. 16 shooting at an ice rink in Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

At the time of the shooting, a boys hockey game was being played. A video acquired by the Providence Journal, part of the USA TODAY Network, from a service that offers live-streaming of sports events shows what appears to be a burst of roughly 13 shots in 6 seconds, and then one final shot, 11 seconds later, coming from an area off camera. It takes several shots before spectators and student athletes alike react, ducking down and seeking shelter before fleeing toward the exits.

Police have not identified any of the victims, but said that the shooting was “targeted” and appeared to be a family dispute.

Who was the shooter?

Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves said the shooting that broke out during a high school hockey game at the Dennis M. Lynch Arena was targeted and appeared to be a family dispute. Goncalves identified the shooter as Robert Dorgan, 56, who also went by the name Roberta Esposito.

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Goncalves repeatedly declined to give more information about the suspect, who died at the arena from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, or those targeted in the shooting, citing the privacy of the victims and the scope of the investigation.

Public records indicate that the shooter moved to Jacksonville, Florida in 2020. Court records show that the shooter’s wife filed for divorce that same year, citing irreconcilable differences.

Under grounds for divorce, Rhonda Dorgan wrote “Gender reassignment surgery, Narcissistic + personality disorder traits” and then crossed that out and wrote “irreconcilable differences which caused the irremediable breakdown of the marriage.”

The Dorgans were married in Rehoboth, Massachusetts in 1992 and their divorce was finalized in 2021, according to court records.

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Court records indicate that the shooter was living in Maine as of 2022.

This story has been updated to add new information.

Contributing: Eryn Dion, Mark Reynolds and Paul Edward Parker, Providence Journal



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Deadly mass shooting at Rhode Island hockey match strikes family – OSV News

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Deadly mass shooting at Rhode Island hockey match strikes family – OSV News


(OSV News) — A deadly shooting erupted during a boys hockey game Feb. 16 in Rhode Island, involving a co-op with a number of players reported to be from an area Catholic school, and may have been motivated by what law enforcement characterized as a “family dispute.”

Police identified the suspect late that Monday as Robert Dugan, a biological male who appeared to identify as a woman and went by the name Roberta Esposito.

Three individuals, including the suspected shooter, were killed and several seriously injured during a Feb. 16 face-off between the Coventry/Johnston and Blackstone Valley High School Hockey Co-op teams at the Dennis M. Lynch arena in Pawtucket, located just over five miles north of Providence.

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The co-op includes players from several schools, including St. Raphael Academy, a coeducational, diocesan, Lasallian Catholic high school in Pawtucket, part of the Diocese of Providence.

OSV News is awaiting a response to its request for comment from St. Raphael Academy.

Police and emergency vehicles are seen outside the Dennis M. Lynch Arena, an indoor ice skating rink, after a shooting in Pawtucket, R.I., Feb. 16, 2026. At least three people, including the suspect, were fatally shot during the Rhode Island youth hockey game, authorities said. (OSV News photo/CJ Gunther, Reuters)

In an afternoon press conference following the attack, Pawtucket Police Chief Tina Goncalves told media the shooter had apparently died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Goncalves said her department had received a call just before 2:30 p.m. regarding an active shooter at the area. She said law enforcement found two individuals, one of whom was the suspect, deceased in the arena.

The third individual killed succumbed to injuries while at the hospital, she said.

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Without releasing the victims’ ages, Goncalves said, “It appears they’re both adults.”

Three additional individuals were hospitalized in critical condition, Goncalves said.

She noted the shooting appeared to be “a targeted event” that “may be a family dispute,” adding police could not release the names of the victims pending notification of the affected families.

Goncalves could not provide additional details, citing the ongoing investigation.

Gina Christian is a multimedia reporter for OSV News. Follow her on X @GinaJesseReina.

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The Pentagon put out a call for autonomous boats. Two Navy veterans started a Rhode Island company to make them. – The Boston Globe

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The Pentagon put out a call for autonomous boats. Two Navy veterans started a Rhode Island company to make them. – The Boston Globe


The next day, Lwin and Joe Turner, also a Navy veteran, quit their jobs and started Havoc – a Rhode Island-based company that does just that.

Officially formed in early 2024, Havoc, now boasts about 130 employees from New England to Hawaii, and produces not only autonomous vessels, but also the software that allows them to do “sophisticated things together,” said Lwin, Havoc’s CEO.

They may, for example, be stationed and programmed to protect a manned-military boat against enemies while traversing the ocean. Stateside, they could enhance security at cargo ports, among other uses, Lwin said.

“Even back in ’24 and now in ’26, there are a lot of people building these robots in different domains. Whether it’s maritime, air, or ground, if you think about it, they’re all robots. They just do different things,” Lwin said.

“We realized that the challenge wasn’t building those specific robots, but the challenge was making those robots work together and work with [humans] to do something useful.”

Lwin recently spoke to the Globe about Havoc’s work, its footprint in Rhode Island, and what’s next for the fast-growing company.

Q. So the idea is that you can have these boats that are equipped with your tech: You make the entire boat and then you make the software that allows the boats to communicate with each other without human input?

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Lwin: Yep. We started with smaller boats, but now we’re all the way up to a 100-foot ship in Hawaii that’s running our software, and now we’ve started putting it on other things, like ground vehicles and quadcopters, and it’s the same exact software stack that’s controlling all of these.

What would be a situation the military would use this for?

There are multiple use cases. One simple use case is transferring supplies. In the Pacific, the US military is moving into these island chains … and you have to transfer supplies between them, right?

If you think about how we do that now, you would use helicopters or manned ships, which put people in danger. In a conflict with China, they’re going to probably shoot down any giant helicopters or any ships, and so you don’t want to put people at risk. So this is a way of using these vessels and these aerial platforms and even land vehicles to move supplies between and in these islands.

The other thing is what we call ISR [or intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance]. You can put thousands of these vessels in the ocean. They create a distributed sensor network. They’re all talking to each other. They can have different sensors on each boat, and then they’re all communicating and fusing that information, and giving you an ability to understand what’s going on in these big ocean areas.

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Is the military and defense industry your primary business right now?

There’s some commercial use cases. We could complement harbor police. The other thing is environmental monitoring.

Right now, after a storm, especially for those [roll-on, roll-off] ships in Narragansett Bay, there are essentially fishing vessels that go out and take depth meters to make sure there’s enough draft, that the ro-ro ships aren’t going to run aground. So it’s very intensive, especially in the freezing cold. We could put those sensors on our vessels, and they could do with a human just sitting in a warm room, controlling hundreds of these vessels safely.

Paul Lwin co-founded Havoc in 2024.Havoc

You have facilities all over the United States. What do you do at your locations in Boston and East Providence?

It’s a hardware site. We would not be where we are if we weren’t based in the Northeast. We needed access to the boat builders – and so Rhode Island makes the most sense – but also water space to test.

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You also have the tech sector here, right? If you think about in Massachusetts, with MIT, Harvard, BU, BC, all of those colleges all have very good engineering programs. And in Rhode Island, you’ve got Brown, URI, right? In Connecticut, you have Yale, UConn. They’re producing very good engineers, and to be able to tap into that pool is what allowed us to move as quickly as possible.

Where do you want Havoc to be in the next two years?

We want to successfully have built thousands of these vessels and put them into the ocean. There’s a very compelling and relevant reason right now: If we do that, we might prevent a war in the Pacific. If the United States is able to put thousands of autonomous vessels and provide our allies with those vessels, it might just change the calculus – for China to not invade Taiwan and have this global conflict. So that is what we are focused on.

This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.


The Boston Globe’s weekly Ocean State Innovators column features a Q&A with Rhode Island innovators who are starting new businesses and nonprofits, conducting groundbreaking research, and reshaping the state’s economy. Send tips and suggestions to rinews@globe.com.

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Christopher Gavin can be reached at christopher.gavin@globe.com.





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