Frustration Mounts as Brown University Shooter Remains at Large

Shock over a shooting rampage at Brown University over the weekend is giving way to frustration over the lack of video footage and suspects.

Authorities in Providence, Rhode Island, said Monday they hadn’t identified any new persons of interest in the shooting that killed two people and injured nine on the Ivy League campus Saturday afternoon. A person detained earlier was released late Sunday, and officials have said a lack of clear security-camera footage from inside the Barus & Holley engineering building where the shooting took place has slowed the search.

The Providence Police Department released three additional videos and two photos Monday night that show the suspected shooter dressed head-to-toe in dark clothing, including a cap and a face mask. The images offer a clearer look than earlier videos that captured an individual walking through city streets from behind and at a side angle, but the person’s face is still obscured. Officials also said that the shooter used a 9mm firearm.

🚨1/4 We are requesting the public’s assistance in identifying a person of interest in Saturday’s incident at Brown University. Please share these video clips and direct all tips to 401-272-3121 or https://t.co/8a1yEMYJya pic.twitter.com/D63mcbnq8J

— Providence Police (@ProvidenceRIPD) December 15, 2025

Providence Mayor Brett Smiley called for “a little bit of patience and grace” as the investigation progresses. “We will move forward but I’m certainly not making light of the fear and anxiety that persists,” he said during the Monday briefing.

Smiley added that he’s put more police patrols in neighborhoods to make people feel safer while the shooter is still at large.

President Donald Trump on Monday said that “hopefully they’re going to capture this animal” and deflected blame away from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for the thus-far stalled apprehension efforts.

“This was a school problem. They had their own guards, they had their own police, they had their own everything,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We came in after the fact, and the FBI will do a good job, but they came in after the fact.”

The FBI is offering a $50,000 reward for information that leads to the shooter’s arrest and conviction.

The shooter’s ability to evade video capture is unusual in an age when investigations of other campus shootings — including the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk earlier this year — and other high-profile crimes, such as last year’s murder of a UnitedHealth Group Inc. executive in Manhattan, have been aided by surveillance cameras and cellphone video quickly shared with the public.

Providence police spent Monday knocking on doors of local residences and businesses near Brown, asking for security-camera footage.

University officials told the Brown Daily Herald in 2020 that the school has roughly 800 security cameras located in “high traffic areas.”

Jack Wrenn, a 2022 graduate of Brown’s doctoral program in computer science, conducted a study of the university’s security camera system in 2020, when he found that the school had one camera for every nine students enrolled. There are no egregious gaps in the university’s surveillance apparatus, he said.

Still, he added that he wasn’t surprised university officials were having difficulty using footage to identify the suspect. The building in which the shooting occurred was built in the 1960s and is located at the edge of campus, abutting a residential neighborhood.

“There just weren’t a lot of cameras in that Brown building, is the reality,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said at a press conference on Sunday.

The investigation’s fits and starts have accelerated some Brown students’ plans to leave campus. Talib Reddick, a senior, originally wasn’t supposed to head home to Maryland until Dec. 21. After final exams were canceled following the shooting, he reserved a flight for Tuesday. Once the person of interest was released late Sunday, however, his family pressed him to fly home immediately.

“I was very surprised we didn’t have a clear picture of the shooter’s face,” Reddick said in an interview before the latest video and photos were published.

Read More: Mass Shooter Manhunt at Brown Resets After Detainee Release

Brown freshman Joseph McGonagle said he’s shocked nearby buildings just off-campus have been slow to produce better evidence. Until the shooting, he never had concerns about security at Brown, he said.

“We all thought that something like this would never happen at an Ivy League, or even Brown specifically for that matter,” McGonagle said.

Campus active shooters have become more common since the 2007 shooting at Virginia Tech that killed 32 people, the deadliest campus shooting to date, according to a report from the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City.

An attempted mass shooting at Florida State University in April killed two students and injured six and in September, Kirk was assassinated by a sniper at Utah Valley University. The violence at Brown on Saturday was the first mass shooting at an Ivy League university.

Rhode Island has one of the lowest rates of death by firearms in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The last deadly mass shooting in Rhode Island was in 2013, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

“I don’t know of a time something like this has ever happened in Providence,” Smiley, the Providence mayor, said in an interview on Sunday. “When you live in a town like this, you don’t think this is going to happen even as you prepare for it.”

With the suspect still on the loose, other universities are taking extra security measures, with some also citing a separate mass shooting in Sydney’s Bondi Beach over the weekend during a Hanukkah event. The University of Rhode Island, whose campus is nearly 30 miles from Brown’s, canceled in-person final exams on Monday.

Harvard University has boosted security measures, including requiring the swipe of a university identification card at two buildings usually open to the public, student newspaper the Harvard Crimson reported. Yale University is requiring school-issued IDs to enter most buildings on its Connecticut campus. The public safety departments at the University of Pennsylvania and Princeton University increased their presence on the campuses.

Columbia University stopped requiring student ID swipe access at non-street accessible academic buildings on its Morningside campus during regular hours earlier this month as part of a broader push to reopen the campus following the pandemic and protests over the war in Gaza, according to the Columbia Spectator. The Ivy League school reinstated mandatory student ID swipe access for all buildings following the Brown shooting and the shooting at Bondi Beach, the student newspaper said.

Even schools as far away as California stepped up their security measures. The University of California at Berkeley sent a reminder to members of its community to be vigilant about tailgating, or allowing someone to follow behind them into a building that’s restricted to key card holders, and not to prop open locked doors. “Even though it can feel natural or polite to hold the door open for others, we ask that you avoid doing so,” Chancellor Richard Lyons said in a note to the campus.

Photo: People gather for a candlelight vigil at Brown University on Dec. 14. Photographer: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America