PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island: The man held as a “person of interest” in the Brown University shooting that left two students dead and nine injured will be released from custody, authorities said on Sunday (Dec 14) night.
Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said earlier at a midday news conference that a man in his 20s had been taken into custody in connection with Saturday’s gun violence but gave no further details.
But at a late-night news conference hours later, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley and other state and local officials told reporters the man detained would be released from custody, saying the investigation was going in a “different direction”.
“We have not yet solved this case, but I am confident we are going to do that in the near future,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said.
Officials declined to elaborate on why the man who was taken into custody was detained in the first place.
“There was a quantum of evidence which justified detaining this person as a person of interest,” Neronha said, adding that investigators later determined there was “no basis to believe that he’s a person of interest, so … he’s being released”.
Authorities said they believed an unidentified person pictured in surveillance footage to be the person they were still looking for.
FBI Director Kash Patel said earlier on Sunday in a post on X that the person of interest had been detained in a hotel room in the Rhode Island town of Coventry, a 30-minute drive from the Brown campus. An FBI team specialising in cellular data analysis used geolocation information to track the suspect, Patel said.
While the killer was presumed to remain at large, authorities said on Sunday night they would not reimpose an initial shelter-in-place order for the campus and surrounding community that had been lifted.
The mass shooting – the latest of nearly 400 in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive – shook the community at the university, one of the oldest in the United States. The school cancelled exams and classes for the rest of the year, and the campus was quiet on Sunday as a light snowfall blanketed the city.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said that authorities, as of midday on Sunday, had not yet contacted all of the victims’ family members because some were travelling. He invited residents to a previously planned event on Sunday to light a Christmas tree and a menorah to mark the first night of Hanukkah.
“It is quite clear that if we can come together as a community and shine a little bit of light tonight, I think there’s nothing better that we could be doing,” Smiley said.
