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Rhode Island has been plunged into terror after police revealed that the Brown University mass shooting suspect is still on the loose.
FBI agents and cops detained a ‘person of interest’ identified as Benjamin Erickson, 24, hours after two were killed in the attack on Saturday – but he was later released.
Now, 40 hours after 11 people were hit with gunfire inside their classroom, the Rhode Island community is waking up with more questions than answers.
Fury has mounted across the state, with fingers being pointed at FBI’s Kash Patel and local law enforcement for failing to track down a suspect.
Erickson, an Army sniper originally from Wisconsin, was taken into custody for questioning about the shooting which killed two Ivy League students on Sunday.
However, within hours of his name being leaked to the public, authorities disclosed at a hastily-convened 11pm press conference that he would be freed.
‘We have a murderer out there,’ said Attorney General Peter Neronha, while Providence Mayor Brett Smiley acknowledged that ‘the news is likely to cause fresh anxiety for our community.’
Authorities have yet to disclose any leads on the murderer’s whereabouts as of Monday morning, sending Rhode Island residents into panic mode.
‘So they let the Brown shooting suspect go and he’s no longer a suspect… and we’re just supposed to send our kids to school today?’ one local wrote on social media.
Police are still hunting for the man pictured in this footage, they said on Sunday
Ella Cook, a 19-year-old sophomore at Brown University and a vice president of the school’s Republican club, has been identified as one of the two students killed in Saturday’s shooting
‘It’s crazy how they haven’t caught him yet with all these cameras! I’m keeping my kids home!’ another anguished mother agreed.
Two students were killed and nine more were injured after the gunman opened fire on students who were in a final exam review session on the Providence campus.
The shooter fired 40 rounds from a 9mm handgun inside Room 166 of the Brown University School of Engineering’s Barus and Holley Building at around 4.05pm.
Ella Cook, 19, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov have been identified as the two students killed in the horror.
Cook, a parishioner at the Cathedral Church of the Advent from Alabama, was described as a ‘bright light’ by her heartbroken family.
Umurzokov’s devastated relatives remembered him as ‘incredibly kind, funny, and smart’, and said he had ‘big dreams of becoming a neurosurgeon and helping people’ on a GoFundMe page.
Despite an enhanced police presence at Brown, officials are not recommending another shelter-in-place order like the one that followed the shooting.
Cops released surveillance footage of a man they are hoping to track down in connection with the shooting, shown from behind wearing all-black.
Officials took Erickson into custody as a ‘person of interest’ at a Hampton Inn hotel in Coventry, Rhode Island, about 20 miles from Providence on Sunday.
Two people familiar with the matter identified that individual as a 24-year-old man from Wisconsin, though authorities never officially released his name.
A heavy law enforcement response descended on the campus, and the Trump administration said FBI and ATF agents were on the scene
The arrest comes after Rhode Island authorities launched an urgent manhunt for a male suspect ‘wearing all black’ as he turned the corner on Waterman Street. (Pictured: Police on campus Sunday morning)
‘I’ve been around long enough to know that sometimes you head in one direction and then you have to regroup and go in another and that’s exactly what has happened over the last 24 hours or so,’ Attorney General Neronha said.
He said that ‘certainly there was some degree of evidence that pointed to the individual’ who’d been taken into custody but ‘that evidence needed to be corroborated and confirmed’
‘Over the last 24 hours leading into just very, very recently, that evidence now points in a different direction,’ Neronha said.
The shooting occurred during one of the busiest moments of the academic calendar, as final exams were underway.
Brown canceled all remaining classes, exams, papers and projects for the semester and told students they could leave campus, underscoring the scale of the disruption and the gravity of the attack.
As police scoured the area for the shooter, many students remained barricaded in rooms while others hid behind furniture and bookshelves.
One video showed students in a library shaking and wincing as they heard loud bangs just before police entered the room to clear the building.
University President Christina Paxson teared up while describing her conversations with students both on campus and in the hospital.
‘They are amazing and they’re supporting each other,’ she said at a news conference. ‘There’s just a lot of gratitude.’
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