By Maria Alejandra Cardona and Rich McKay
PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island, Dec 15 (Reuters) – Authorities on Monday had renewed a manhunt for the gunman who killed two students and injured seven more at Brown University over the weekend, after releasing a man who had been held on Sunday as a “person of interest” in the shooting.
Though officials said late on Sunday they were resuming the search for a suspect, they 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.
Police have released surveillance footage showing the possible shooter dressed in black walking near the building where the attack took place, though his face is not visible.
The gunman fled after shooting students 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.
At a press conference late on Sunday, officials said there had been enough evidence to justify taking into custody the unnamed person of interest, a man in his 20s.
But Providence Mayor Brett Smiley told reporters the investigation was going in a “different direction,” without offering more detail. Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said investigators had determined there was “no basis to believe that he’s a person of interest, so… he’s being released.”
The mass shooting shook the campus at Brown, 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, and the campus was quiet on Sunday as a light snowfall blanketed the city.
SHOOTING VICTIMS MOURNED
The two students killed were Ella Cook, a sophomore from Mountain Brook, Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a citizen of Uzbekistan, according to statements from various officials.
Cook was 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. Her LinkedIn profile included jobs as an ice cream server at a Mountain Brook creamery and a program assistant in New York.
“Wesley and I join the Mountain Brook community and all of Alabama in mourning the heartbreaking loss of one of our own, Ella Cook, who was senselessly killed over the weekend on Brown University’s campus,” U.S. Senator Katie Britt of Alabama wrote in a statement with her husband, Wesley.
Umurzokov, an aspiring neurosurgeon, was “the most kind-hearted person,” according to a GoFundMe campaign set up by his family.
“He always lent a helping hand to anyone in need without hesitation, and was the most kind-hearted person our family knew,” the family wrote. “Our family is incredibly devastated by this loss.”
He graduated from Midlothian High School in Virginia this spring, according to the Washington Post. In a statement, the U.S. ambassador to Uzbekistan, Jonathan Henick, mourned “the loss of his bright future.”
STUDENTS CAUGHT BY SURPRISE
Ref Bari, 22, a graduate student at Brown, said he was inside the Barus & Holley building when he heard a series of loud popping sounds that appeared to be gunfire.
Bari ran out of the building and asked another student running in the street if he could hide with her and her friends and she agreed. They returned to her basement apartment and hid in the bathroom.
“She trusted me,” he said. “The only connection between us is we’re both students at Brown but beyond that, we don’t know each other.”
Teaching assistant Joseph Oduro, 21, told CNN he was in a classroom that was attacked.
“The first couple of gunshots went straight to the chalkboard right where I was standing,” Oduro said. “Who knows, if I didn’t duck, maybe I’m not here today.”
A student next to him took two bullets to the leg and was due to undergo surgery on Sunday, he said.
(Reporting by Maria Alejandra Cardona in Providence and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Additional reporting by Helen Coster and Nathan Layne; Writing by Steve Gorman and Joseph Ax; Editing by Bill Berkrot)
