The manhunt for the gunman who killed two Brown University students and injured seven more in a classroom shooting stretched into a fourth day on Tuesday, leaving the US campus and surrounding neighbourhood on edge.
Authorities, including the FBI, released a timeline video comprised of surveillance clips from neighbourhood cameras and a car’s dashcam tracking the movements of the suspected gunman on Saturday, in the hopes that someone might recognise him.
The clips, stitched together, show a man dressed in dark clothes and wearing a mask walking briskly, and at one point running, between 2pm and 3pm along several different streets, about a block away from the building where the attack would later take place.
The shooting occurred at 4.03pm, and another clip showed the same person from a distance walking from the building’s parking lot toward the street, even as police cars with flashing emergency lights pull up to the scene. The final clip shows the man walking along that street about three minutes after the shooting.
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The search intensified after investigators late on Sunday released another “person of interest,” whose detention had brought some short-lived relief to anxious students and residents. Officers went door-to-door on Monday seeking any cameras that might have captured the shooter on Saturday.
The College Hill neighbourhood of Providence, Rhode Island, near campus has been eerily quiet, residents said, after many Brown students hastily cleared out of Providence and many neighbours were staying inside with locked doors and drawn blinds.
Patrick Moran has been supervising his young children’s video games, Lego building, puzzle playing and ear-piercing drumming after their private school, the Wheeler School, cancelled classes for the rest of the week.
“I am happy to have them home. The shooter is still out there, and so let’s take a little precaution and keep the kids home,” Mr Moran said.
Public schools in Providence remained open on Tuesday, but the district cancelled after-school activities. Providence mayor Brett Smiley said on Monday that parents should send their children to school if they feel comfortable doing so.
Mr Smiley has made a point of being out and about in the neighbourhood and stopped for coffee at L’Artisan Cafe on Monday. The cafe is a short distance from where the shooting happened and a place uniformed police officers often stop in for coffee and to warm up. The last days they have been largely absent from the cafe amid stepped-up patrols.
Providence police chief Oscar Perez said law enforcement was trying to reassure residents by keeping a visibly high profile in the community.
“The sooner we can identify this person, the sooner we can blow this case open,” state attorney general Peter Neronha said on Monday.
In a statement on Monday evening, Brown said it had implemented enhanced security measures since the shooting, including doubling the university department of public safety’s staffing and restricting entry to campus buildings.
The gunman on Saturday afternoon walked into an engineering and physics building with the doors left unlocked while exams were taking place, according to police. He opened fire with a 9mm gun inside a classroom and then fled, triggering a campus lockdown that left students barricaded in classrooms or hiding beneath furniture for hours.
Investigators detained a man in his 20s on Sunday but released him late in the day after concluding that he was not involved. Officials have not detailed the evidence that initially led them to take the unnamed man into custody.
Brown is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the United States. The Ivy League school, which has nearly 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students, cancelled exams and classes for the rest of the year.
The two students killed were Ella Cook, a sophomore from Mountain Brook, Alabama, and freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a Uzbekistan-born Virginian.
Cook (19) was the vice-president of the school’s College Republicans and a “leading Republican voice at Brown”, according to an X post from the New York Republicans Club. In her hometown, she worked at an ice cream shop in high school, where her coworkers used to tell customers with pride that she was headed to a top-rated school.
Umurzokov (18) had moved with his family as a child to Virginia, where he graduated Midlothian High School this spring as a top-10 student. He had planned to become a neurosurgeon.
“He always lent a helping hand to anyone in need without hesitation, and was the most kind-hearted person our family knew,” his family wrote in an online fundraising post. “Our family is incredibly devastated by this loss.” – Reuters
