Police have detained a “person of interest” in connection with the Brown University shooting that left two students dead and another nine people wounded at the US Ivy League school.
Providence’s chief public information officer for public safety Kristy DosReis said the person of interest was in police custody after the shooting.
The university said in an advisory on Sunday that police had also lifted a shelter-in-place order for its campus in Rhode Island.
More than 400 law enforcement personnel had been deployed on Saturday as police sought a suspect who had entered a building where students were taking exams with a firearm.
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The Providence university said that police officers remained in areas still considered an active crime scene.
Access to parts of the campus remained restricted on Sunday as police maintained a security perimeter around Minden Hall and nearby apartment buildings, said Brown, which has hundreds of buildings, including lecture halls, laboratories and dorms.
Streets around the campus had been packed with emergency vehicles and security was heightened around the city on Saturday as officials said law enforcement agencies sought the gunman.
Officials released a video of a suspect, a male possibly in his 30s and dressed in black. Providence Deputy Police Chief Timothy O’Hara said on Saturday the individual may have worn a mask, but officials were not certain.
Investigators retrieved shell casings from the scene, but police were not prepared to release details, O’Hara added.
The gunman fled after shooting students in a classroom in Brown’s Barus and Holley engineering building, where outer doors had been unlocked while exams were taking place, officials said.
Detectives were looking into why that location was targeted, police chief Oscar Perez told reporters at a news conference.
Brown president Christina Paxson told reporters that all or nearly all of the victims were students, adding: “This is the day one hopes never happens, and it has.”
Seven of the nine people wounded were listed as critical late Saturday, Brown University Health said.
The shooting occurred in the Barus and Holley building, a seven-storey complex that houses the School of Engineering and the physics department. According to the university’s w
Brown, the seventh-oldest higher education institution in the US, is one of the nation’s most prestigious colleges, with roughly 7,300 undergraduates and more than 3,000 graduate students.
President Donald Trump told reporters that he had been briefed and “all we can do right now is pray for the victims”.
Rhode Island has some of the strictest gun laws in the US.
Last spring, the Democratic-controlled legislature passed an assault weapon ban that will prohibit the sale and manufacturing of certain high-powered firearms, but not their possession, starting next July. - Reuters/ Associated Press
