At least 2 killed, 9 injured in shooting at Brown University in Rhode Island, suspect at large

Streets around the school campus remained blocked off hours after the shooting while law enforcement officials heightened security around the city as police continued their manhunt.

Providence officials told reporters at a news conference that police are looking for a male dressed in black and were scouring local video cameras in the area for footage to get a better description of the suspect, AP quoted.

University officials initially told students and staff that a suspect was in custody, before later saying that was not the case and that police were still searching for a suspect or suspects, according to alerts issued through Brown’s emergency notification system.

According to officials, the gunman escaped after shooting people at Brown’s Barus & Holley engineering building, where exams were underway at the time.

“We are a week and a half away from Christmas. And two people died today and another eight are in the hospital,” Mayor Brett Smiley said. “So please pray for those families,” AP quoted.

“The shelter-in-place allows (law enforcement) to do their work in the first phase of the investigation,” Smiley added, according to a Reuters report.

Officials could not yet disclose details about the victims, including whether they were students, news agency quoted Smiley as saying.

Brown is located on the College Hill in Providence, Rhode Island’s state capital. The university consists of hundreds of buildings, including lecture halls, laboratories and dormitories.

A student Chiang-Heng Chien told local TV station WJAR that he was working in a lab with three other students when he saw the text about the active shooter situation a block away. They waited under desks for about two hours, he said.

The search for the suspect was hampered in part because downtown Providence was crowded with holiday shoppers and thousands of people attending concerts, the local media reports noted. Federal law enforcement and police from surrounding cities and towns are assisting in the search, officials said. According to local news reports, venues across the city have been implementing additional security.

President Donald Trump, meanwhile, told reporters at the White House that he had been briefed on the “terrible” situation.

“All we can do right now is pray for the victims and for those that were very badly hurt,” he said.

Probe on

More than 400 law enforcement personnel have been deployed, including agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, who are working with local and state police on the investigation.

Investigators, according to Reuters, retrieved shell casings from the scene of the shooting, but police are not prepared to release details yet, Providence Deputy Police Chief Timothy O’Hara said.

“Some tips have been coming in. We have been running them down,” O’Hara said. “None of them have worked out for us yet.”

Detectives are looking into why that location was targeted, police Chief Oscar Perez told reporters at a news conference.

Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee vowed that the shooter would be brought to justice. “We’re going to make sure that we catch the individual that brought so much suffering to so many people,” Reuters quoted McKee as saying.

Mass shootings in schools, workplaces, and places of worship are more common in the US, which has some of the most permissive gun laws in the developed world.

The Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as any incident in which four or more victims have been shot, has counted 389 of them this year in the US, including at least six such shootings at schools, AP highlighted.

Last year the US had more than 500 mass shootings, according to the archive.