NEW YORK: Rhode Island police were searching for a suspect in a shooting at Brown University in Providence that left two people dead and eight seriously injured at the Ivy League school, officials said.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said at a news conference that police were still searching for the shooter, who attacked the Brown’s Barus and Holley engineering building, where exams were taking place at the time. Authorities said police were looking for a man dressed in black and were searching local video camera footage from the area to get a better description of the suspect.
Smiley said officials could not yet release details about the victims, including whether they were students. He regretted the shooting.
“We are a week and a half away from Christmas. And today two people died and another eight are in the hospital,” he said. “So please pray for those families.”
Brown is on College Hill in Providence, the state capital of Rhode Island. The university has hundreds of buildings, including lecture halls, laboratories and dormitories.
As news of the shooting spread, the school told students to shelter in place.
Chiang-Heng Chien, a Brown University student, told local television station WJAR that he was working in a lab with three other students when he saw the text about the active shooter situation a block away. They waited under desks for about two hours, he said.
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 now is pray for the victims and those who were seriously injured.”
Compared to many countries, mass shootings in 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 United States, including at least six of those school shootings. Last year the United States had more than 500 mass shootings, according to the archive.
Complicating the search, local media reports said downtown Providence was packed with holiday shoppers and thousands of people attending concerts. Federal authorities and police from surrounding cities and towns were assisting in the search, officials said.
