A gunman killed two people and injured nine others after opening fire at Brown University’s engineering and physics building in Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday, officials said.
The unidentified gunman left after the shooting at the Barus & Holley building, on the eastern edge of the campus, Commander Timothy O’Hara, deputy chief of Providence police, said Saturday night.
People in the area were advised to shelter in place amid an active manhunt.
A spokesperson Brown University Health, which operates Rhode Island Hospital, where the injured were being treated, said seven people remained in critical condition and one had been stabilized. An 11th victim was identified hours after the shooting, and had non-life-threatening injuries from fragments, officials said.
O’Hara described the gunman only as “a male dressed in black.”
The attack was reported just after 4 p.m. at Brown’s Barus & Holley building, a seven-story structure home to much of the university’ engineering and physics study and research, officials said.
It happened inside a first-floor classroom at the Barus & Holley building, officials said. The outer doors of the building were open at the time because exams were taking place, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said.
“It is unknown how he entered the building, but we do know that he exited the Hope Street side of that complex,” O’Hara said.
An alert on Brown’s Emergency Information website instructed people to lock doors, silence phones and stay safe.
A shelter-in-place advisory was still in effect Saturday night for the campus — including any of the 11,000 enrolled students who remained at the Ivy League university — and the Providence neighborhoods surrounding the school, Smiley said.
On Saturday afternoon, officials walked back an earlier alert stating someone was taken into custody, leaving people in the city of roughly 190,000 in fear and uncertainty.
Students hid under desks
Brown is in the middle of final exams, which began Friday, continued Saturday and were scheduled to be held through next weekend, according to the university’s academic calendar.
University President Christina H. Paxson said in a message to the school’s community that the shooting marked “a deeply tragic day for Brown, our families and our local community.”
Chiang-Heng Chien, a Ph.D engineering student who was working at a campus lab, said people hid under their desks as shots rang out.
“We decided to turn the lights off and close all the doors and hide under our desks,” Chiang-Heng Chien told NBC affiliate WJAR of Providence.
After two hours, police moved in and told those in the lab to get out as fast as possible as they cleared the building in their search for the attacker, Chien said.
Smiley said Saturday night that he lives “about a block away” from where the violence unfolded.
He said he saw lights and sirens zooming past his house and O’Hara called him to give him an update.
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.”
The search for the suspect was hampered in part because downtown Providence was crowded with holiday shoppers and thousands of people attending concerts, local media said. Federal law enforcement and police from surrounding cities and towns were assisting in the search, officials said. According to local news reports, venues across the city were bringing in extra security.
President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that he had been briefed on the situation, which he called “terrible.”
“All we can do right now is pray for the victims and for those that were very badly hurt.”
Compared to many countries, mass shootings in schools, workplaces, and places of worship are more common in the U.S., 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 U.S., including at least six such shootings at schools.
Last year the U.S. had more than 500 mass shootings, according to the archive.
By NBC News
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