US authorities released audio of police calls and about 20 minutes of body camera footage from the officer responsible for the initial response to the shooting.
This Monday, US authorities released new video footage of the shooting at Brown University, attributed to a now deceased Portuguese citizen, who killed two students and injured nine others last December.
The material now released includes audio of a university campus police officer calling the city police at 4:07 pm local time.
“This is the Brown police. We have confirmed shots fired at 184 Hope Street,” the officer said. “We have a victim, but we don’t know where he is,” he added.
Four minutes later, campus police called back with an update: “We have a description of the suspect, dressed in all black and a ski mask, direction of travel unknown.”
Separately, the city released about 20 minutes of body camera footage from the officer responsible for the initial response to the shooting. The most graphic and violent images were censored to avoid affecting the victims and to “maintain trust in the community”, showing a chaotic and confusing scene in which officers do not know if the shooter is still in the building and quickly try to find a safe place to remove students from the building. Backpacks, gloves and other scattered objects can be seen in the hallway. An officer warns his colleagues: “The shooter may still be in the building, so be careful.”
The city also released audio of communications between agents and intervention operators. “Attention, this is an active shooter situation. We have multiple victims in this building,” an officer said.
Media outlets in the United States and other countries began requesting police officers’ body camera footage, audio clips and other public records shortly after the shooting. The city released those records today, saying they waited, at the request of the victims’ families, until after a memorial was held last week on Brown’s campus.
“It is incredibly important to me that the city of Providence remains fully transparent, accountable and compliant with the state’s Access to Public Records Act,” Providence Chamber President Brett Smiley said in a statement. “We also know that the images and audio we are forced to release will likely be harmful and traumatizing to victims, families and neighbors still trying to recover from this incident,” he said.
Cláudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese citizen, is also suspected of being responsible for the attack at the university and, two days later, killing the professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), also Portuguese Nuno Loureiro, in his home in Brookline, a suburb of Boston.
Neves Valente, who attended school with Loureiro in Portugal in the 1990s, was found dead days later in a warehouse in New Hampshire.
According to the US Department of Justice, Neves Valente planned the attack for years and left videos in which he confessed to the murders, but did not indicate any motive. The FBI (federal police) recovered the electronic device that contained the series of videos during a search of the warehouse where Neves Valente’s body was found.
