Two Brown University students were killed and nine others wounded on Saturday when a murderer dressed in black opened fire in the Rhode Island Ivy League school’s engineering building as students took final exams.
Providence Police briefly took a “person of interest” into custody but released him late Sunday, saying that evidence was now pointing in a different direction, WBTS reported.
“This is what these investigations look like,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said. “I’ve been around long enough to know that sometimes you head in one direction and you have to regroup and go in another and that’s exactly what’s happened over the last 24 hours or so.”
Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez said the person of interest was picked up by the FBI at a hotel in Coventry.
“They followed through with it and they ended up coming and locating this individual of interest,” Perez told reporters, according to the Providence Journal.
But further investigation from the police department didn’t support the tip.
“That evidence was examined and we didn’t have enough to prosecute anybody and so that person was released,” he said.
Unlike other recent high-profile shootings, no federal authorities appeared the press conference announcing the release of the person o of interest.
The shooting took place at about 4 p.m. in the Barus & Holley engineering building during an economics class, Brown President Christina Paxson told NPR. She said that two students were killed and eight others were shot. A ninth person was hit by shrapnel.
Seven of the victims were in critical but stable condition Sunday night, she said. Another was in critical condition, and the last was treated and released.
“Our community is strong, and we’ll get through it,” she said in a press briefing Sunday. “But it’s devastating.”
Officials released a brief video of a person of interest walking away from the building, but the video did not show his face.
The two fatalities have been identified as Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a student from Uzbekistan, and Ella Cook, who began attending the school last year from Alabama, the Journal reported. Umurzokov was studying to be a neurosurgeon, according to a GoFundMe.
The shooting recalled another mass shooting in an engineering building — the December 6, 1989, murder of 14 women studying at Polytechnique Montreal. Ten other woman and four men where wounded in that shooting and stabbing by a man who then killed himself. In a suicide letter, the gunman blamed feminists for ruining his life. The shooting led to more stringent gun control laws in Canada as well as changes to emergency response procedures.
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[Featured image: A bouquet of flowers rests on snow on the campus of Brown University not far from where a shooting took place. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)]
