Authorities have yet to name any suspects in Saturday’s shooting at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others — the latest in a series of tragedies this year involving gun violence on college campuses.
During a news conference late Sunday, law-enforcement officials said they would release a person of interest who had been detained and questioned, saying they didn’t have evidence to connect him to the crime but declining to provide further details. Providence’s mayor emphasized that he believed the city and campus were safe.
Brown leaders have called off nearly all in-person final exams and sent students home.
On Saturday around 4 p.m., a gunman targeted a specific classroom hosting a final-exam review session for an introductory economics class. About 60 students were in the room, the undergraduate teaching assistant leading the session told The New York Times. He also said that the gunman shouted something before opening fire.
Christina H. Paxson, Brown’s president, said in a Sunday statement that seven of the student victims were hospitalized in stable condition, while one was in critical condition. Another victim was treated and released Saturday. Paxson said a “couple thousand” students had to be evacuated from the campus overnight as law-enforcement officials continued their investigation.
The shooting took place on the first floor of the Barus and Holley building, which houses the School of Engineering and the physics department. The building’s exterior doors were unlocked, university officials said, because final exams were being taken in the building. Students and others across the campus were forced to shelter in place for several hours Saturday.
Peter Neronha, Rhode Island’s attorney general, said Sunday that authorities didn’t have a lot of campus surveillance footage to work with. “There just weren’t a lot of cameras in that Brown building,” he said. “That’s the reality.”
Francis J. Doyle III, Brown’s provost, released guidance Sunday on concluding the fall semester. Students can accept a final grade based on work submitted prior to December 13; completing previously assigned papers or take-home exams is optional, but they can be submitted for a grade. Students can also elect to pass/fail classes retroactively.
Higher education has been forced to reckon with a heightened potential for shootings.
In April, a 21-year-old former Florida State University student, Phoenix Ikner, allegedly shot and killed two people, a staff member and a vendor employee, and wounded five others; prosecutors have said they intend to seek the death penalty. A 22-year-old Utah man, Tyler Robinson, is accused of shooting the conservative activist Charlie Kirk during a speaking event in September at Utah Valley University; Kirk later died at a hospital. And at Kentucky State University, a 48-year-old man was charged last week in a campus shooting that killed one student and critically injured another. The man is reportedly a parent of two students who attend the institution.
In some recent shootings, like at Michigan State University in 2023 — where three students were killed and five others were wounded — the shooter’s decision to target a college campus appeared random. (The shooter, Anthony Dwayne McRae, a 43-year-old Michigan man with no connection to the university, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.)
In shootings at the University of Arizona in 2022 and the University of Nevada at Las Vegas in 2023, the acts were premeditated, according to police. At Arizona, a disgruntled former graduate student, 48-year-old Murad Dervish, shot and killed a professor; he was convicted of murder last year. At UNLV, a 67-year-old man who’d been rejected for teaching jobs at the business school, Anthony James Polito, killed three faculty members and wounded a fourth; he was killed in a shootout with police officers.
