By Maria Alejandra Cardona and Rich McKay
PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island, Dec 15 (Reuters) – Authorities on Monday renewed their search for the gunman who killed two students and wounded seven others at Brown University over the weekend, who was arrested as a “person of interest” in Sunday’s shooting.
Although officials said late 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 surrounding areas that had previously been lifted.
Although the face of the alleged shooter walking in black clothing near the attacked building was not seen, police have released surveillance footage.
According to police, the gunman fled after shooting students into a classroom in Brown’s Barus & Holley Engineering and Physics Building, where an exterior door was left open while an exam was in progress.
At a news conference late Sunday, authorities said there was enough evidence to justify detaining an unidentified person of interest, a man in his 20s.
But Providence Mayor Brett Smiley told reporters the investigation was going “in a different direction,” without giving further details. Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said investigators had determined “there is no basis to believe he is a person of interest, so … he is being released.”
A mass shooting rocked the campus of Brown, one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the United States. The Ivy League school, home to nearly 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students, canceled exams and classes for the rest of the year, and the campus was quiet Sunday as a light snow blanketed the city.
The victims of the shooting are in mourning
The two students killed were Ella Cook, a sophomore from Mountain Brook, Alabama, and Muhammed Aziz Umarzhokov, a citizen of Uzbekistan, according to statements from various authorities.
Cook was vice president of the school’s College Republicans and a “leading Republican voice” at Brown, according to the X-Post of the New York Republican Club. Her LinkedIn profile included jobs as an ice cream server at 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 our own, Ella Cook, who was senselessly killed over the weekend on the campus of Brown University,” U.S. Senator Katie Britt of Alabama wrote in a statement with her husband, Wesley.
Umarzhokov, an aspiring neurosurgeon, was “the kindest person,” according to a GoFundMe campaign set up by his family.
“He always gave a helping hand to anyone in need without hesitation, and was the kindest person our family has ever known,” 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, U.S. Ambassador to Uzbekistan Jonathan Henick mourned the “loss of her bright future.”
The students were surprised
Brown graduate student Ref Bari, 22, said he was inside the Barus & Holley building when he heard what sounded like gunshots.
Bari ran out of the building and asked another student running down the street if she could hide with her and her friends, and she agreed. They returned to her basement apartment and hid in the bathroom.
“He believed in me,” he said. “The only connection between us is that we’re both students at Brown, but beyond that, we don’t know each other.”
Joseph Oduro, a 21-year-old teaching assistant, told CNN he was in the classroom where the attack happened.
“The first few gunshots went straight through the chalkboard where I was standing,” Oduro said. “Who knows, if I hadn’t laughed, maybe I wouldn’t be here today.”
A student next to him was shot twice in the leg and would undergo surgery on Sunday, he said.
(Reporting by Maria Alejandra Cardona in Providence and Rich McKay in Atlanta; Additional reporting by Helen Koster and Nathan Lane; Writing by Steve Gorman and Joseph X; Editing by Bill Burkrot)
