Por Mrmampa Dey
Dec 14 (Reuters) – Providence police have arrested a ‘person of interest’ in connection with the shooting at Brown University in the United States, which .
Kristy DosReis, chief information officer for public safety, told Reuters that a person of interest was in police custody following the attack at the US university.
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Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez told reporters that a suspect was taken into custody Sunday morning and that they are not currently looking for anyone else.
Authorities have declined to release details about the individual as the investigation remains ongoing.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said the seven people injured at Brown University were in stable condition. One remains in critical but stable condition, while another has already been discharged, he added.
Smiley said the shelter-in-place order for nearby neighborhoods was lifted after the arrest, but some streets remain closed while investigators work at the scene. Residents should expect a visible police presence throughout the city, he said.
“Providence residents can breathe a little easier this morning,” Smiley added.
Brown said Sunday that police had also lifted the shelter-in-place order for the Rhode Island campus.
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More than 400 law enforcement agents were mobilized on Saturday to search for a suspect who had entered a building where students were taking exams with a gun.
Access to some parts of the campus remained restricted Sunday as police maintained a security perimeter around Minden Hall and nearby apartment buildings, said Brown, which has hundreds of buildings including classrooms, laboratories and dormitories.
On Saturday, streets around the campus were lined with emergency vehicles as law enforcement searched for the shooter.
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Agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives were working closely with local and state police.
Authorities released a video of a suspect, a man possibly in his 30s and dressed in black. Providence Deputy Police Chief Timothy O’Hara said Saturday that the individual may have been wearing a mask, but authorities were not sure.
Investigators collected shell casings at the scene, O’Hara added.
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The gunman fled after shooting at students in a classroom at Brown University’s Barus & Holley engineering building, where the exterior doors were unlocked while exams were being taken, authorities said.
Brown University President Christina Paxson told reporters that all or nearly all of the victims were students. “This is the day we hope will never happen, but it did,” she added.
UNDER TABLES FOR HOURS
As news of the shooting spread, the school told students to remain in their dorms.
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Brown University student Chiang-Heng Chien told local station WJAR that he was working in a lab with three other students when he saw the message about the active shooter a block away. They were hidden under desks for about two hours, he said.
Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee has promised that the shooter will be brought to justice.
President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House on Saturday that he had been briefed on the situation, which he called “dire.”
Compared to many countries, mass shootings at schools, workplaces and places of worship are more common in the United States, 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 were shot, has counted 389 of them this year in the U.S., including at least six in schools.
Last year, the US recorded more than 500 mass shootings, according to the archive.
(Reporting by Mrinmay Dey in Bengaluru, Chris Prentice in New York, Jason Lange in Washington and Svea Herbst and Keval Singh in Singapore)
