Hunt for US university shooter renewed as man released
Maria Alejandra Cardona, Svea Herbst-Bayliss and Rich McKay |
US police are going door-to-door seeking footage from home surveillance cameras as investigators renew a manhunt for the gunman who killed two students and injured seven more in a classroom at Brown University.
The search for the suspect, which included posting new video footage of the possible shooter, resumed after authorities released a man they had detained at the weekend as a “person of interest”.
The news that the gunman remained at large put Providence back on edge, though officials said there were no credible threats to the community and that they would not reimpose a shelter-in-place order for the campus and the surrounding area that had been lifted earlier.
Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez told reporters that law enforcement was trying to reassure residents by keeping a visibly high profile in the community.
Perez played three short video clips from home surveillance footage of the suspect, a man of stocky build dressed in a dark jacket, hat and face mask, walking through the College Hill neighbourhood near campus about two hours before the shooting.
One showed him pacing along a white picket fence, another crossing a street corner and another walking past a gated home.
Two still photos of him on a footpath were also shown, but the man’s face was obscured by the mask he wore.
“The sooner we can identify this person, the sooner we can blow this case open,” state Attorney-General Peter Neronha said at the briefing on Monday.
An FBI special agent in charge from Boston, Ted Docks, said a $US50,000 ($A75,000) reward was being offered for information leading to the identification, arrest and conviction of the suspect, who he said was presumed to be armed and dangerous.
Perez said the murder weapon was a 9mm gun from which several rounds were fired.
The neighbourhood was eerily quiet on Monday, several residents told Reuters, as most people were staying behind locked doors.
Officers were knocking on doors, asking whether anyone had seen anything or had any cameras that might have caught a glimpse of the suspect, while police helicopters whirred overhead.
The shooter fled after opening fire from a 9mm gun on Saturday in a classroom in Brown’s Barus & Holley engineering and physics building, where outer doors had been left unlocked while exams were taking place, according to police.
Students spent hours barricaded in classrooms or hiding beneath furniture as officers fanned out across campus searching for the attacker.
Officials said late on Sunday there had been enough evidence to justify taking into custody the unnamed person of interest, a man in his 20s.
The announcement of the detainment early on Sunday provided what turned out to be a short-lived measure of relief for students and city residents.
Neronha said hours later that investigators had determined there was “no basis to believe that he’s a person of interest, so … he’s being released”.
On Monday, the attorney-general said the individual “has been cleared”, adding, “The investigation has now gone in a different direction.”
Brown, which is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the United States, cancelled exams and classes for the rest of 2025.
The two students killed were Ella Cook, a sophomore from Mountain Brook, Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a Uzbekistan-born Virginian.
Reuters
