By Svea Herbst-Bayliss and Helen Coster
Dec 16 (Reuters) – 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 campus and surrounding neighborhood on edge.
Authorities have yet to identify the shooter, officials said at an evening press conference on Monday. Police have released several surveillance video clips and images of the suspected gunman both before and immediately after Saturday’s shooting in the hope that the public can help identify him, but his face was obscured by a mask.
The search intensified late on Sunday after investigators released a “person of interest,” whose detention had brought some short-lived relief to anxious students and residents. Officers have since gone door-to-door seeking any cameras that might have captured the shooter on Saturday.
The College Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island, near campus has been eerily quiet, residents said, after many Brown students hastily cleared out of Providence and many neighbors 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, canceled 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,” Moran said.
Public schools in Providence remained open on Tuesday, but the district canceled after-school activities. Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said on Monday that parents should send their children to school if they feel comfortable doing so.
Smiley has made a point of being out and about in the neighborhood 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.
ENHANCED SECURITY IN PLACE
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, canceled 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-ten 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.”
(Reporting by Svea Herbst-Bayliss, Helen Coster and Maria Tsvetkova; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Paul Thomasch and Bill Berkrot)
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