Police renew search for US university gunman after releasing person of interest
Authorities announced the man’s release at a news conference late on Sunday.
US police have renewed their search for the gunman who killed two students and wounded nine others, a day after they released a person of interest after determining the evidence pointed “in a different direction”.
Authorities announced the man’s release at a news conference late on Sunday, marking a setback in the investigation into Saturday’s attack at Brown University.
It unravelled progress authorities thought they had made at the start of the day when they announced they had detained him at a Rhode Island hotel in connection with the attack and lifted a lockdown at the Ivy League school’s campus.
Providence mayor Brett Smiley said he understood that the community was anxious, but that there had been no credible threats of further violence since the shooting.
The release of the person of interest left law enforcement without any known suspect, with officials pledging to redouble their efforts by canvassing for video surveillance that could help pinpoint the killer’s identity.
“We have a murderer out there,” attorney general Peter Neronha said.
On Sunday morning, officials took into custody a person of interest at a Hampton Inn in Coventry, Rhode Island, about 20 miles (32km) from Providence.
“I’ve been around long enough to know that sometimes you head in one direction and then you have to regroup and go in another, and that’s exactly what has happened over the last 24 hours or so,” Mr Neronha said.
He said there was some evidence that pointed to the man authorities detained, but “that evidence needed to be corroborated and confirmed”.
“And over the last 24 hours leading into just very, very recently, that evidence now points in a different direction,” he said.
Authorities believe they are looking for a person shown in a small, short clip of video footage walking away, the mayor said. The person’s back is to the camera.
“Right now, we don’t have any evidence to suggest that it was more than that individual,” Mr Smiley said in a television interview.
Despite an enhanced police presence at the university, officials were not recommending another shelter-in-place order such as the one that followed the Saturday-afternoon shooting, when hundreds of officers searched for the attacker and urged students and staff to remain indoors.
The shooting occurred as final exams were under way.
The gunman opened fire inside a classroom in the engineering building, firing more than 40 rounds from a 9mm handgun, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press.
Two handguns were recovered when the person of interest was taken into custody and authorities also found two loaded 30-round magazines, the official said.
Investigators were not immediately sure how the gunman got inside the first-floor classroom in a seven-storey complex that houses the school of engineering and physics department.
The attack set off hours of disruption on campus and in the surrounding neighbourhoods, as hundreds of officers searched for the attacker.
One video showed students in a library shaking and wincing as they heard loud bangs just before police entered the room to clear the building.
During the lockdown, which was not lifted until Sunday, after the person of interest was taken into custody, many students remained barricaded in rooms while others hid behind furniture and bookshelves as police searched for the gunman.
One of the nine wounded students has been released from the hospital, university president Christina Paxson said on Sunday. Seven others were in critical but stable conditions, and one was in a critical condition.
Brown, the seventh-oldest higher education institution in the US, is one of the nation’s most prestigious colleges, with roughly 7,300 undergraduates and more than 3,000 graduate students. The school cancelled all remaining classes and exams for the semester.
