PROVIDENCE: The ongoing effort to find a man who walked onto Brown University ‘s campus during a busy exam season and shot nearly a dozen students in a crowded lecture hall has raised questions about the school’s security systems and the urgency of the investigation itself.
A day after Saturday’s mass shooting, officials said a person of interest taken into custody would be released without charges, leaving investigators with little actionable insight from the limited security video they had recovered and scrambling to develop new leads.
Law enforcement officials were still doing the most basic investigative work two days after the shooting that killed two students and wounded nine, canvassing local residences and businesses for security camera footage and looking for physical evidence. That’s left students and some Providence residents frustrated at gaps in the university’s security and camera systems that helped allow the shooter to disappear.
“The fact that we’re in such a surveillance state but that wasn’t used correctly at all is just so deeply frustrating,” said Li Ding, a student at the nearby Rhode Island School of Design who dances on a Brown University team.
A petition for increased security
