Person Of Interest In Custody After Deadly Shooting At US University

US authorities on Sunday detained a person of interest in a shooting at Brown University that left two people dead and nine others wounded, the latest in a long line of school attacks across the country.

A shooter opened fire on Saturday at the elite Ivy League university in Providence, Rhode Island in a building where exams were taking place, triggering a campus lockdown and launching an hours-long hunt for the suspect.

During a press conference early Sunday, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said a “person of interest” had been detained and the shelter-in-place order lifted.

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“I want to offer my profound thanks to all the hardworking men and women in law enforcement who worked through the night to be able to get us to this point,” Smiley said.

Speaking alongside him, Police Colonel Oscar Perez added authorities were “not at this point” looking for anyone else in relation to the attack.

Of the nine wounded, one is in critical condition, seven are in stable condition and one has been discharged, Smiley said.

Witness Katie Sun told the Brown Daily Herald student newspaper she was studying in a building on campus when she heard gunfire nearby. She ran to her dormitory, leaving all her belongings behind.

“It was honestly quite terrifying. The shots seemed like they were coming from where the classrooms are,” she said.

Brown University student Lydell Dyer was working in the school’s gym at the time, according to CNN.

“We had to go gather everybody, bring them up to the top floor, turn off the lights, and put down the blinds,” he told the broadcaster, saying he hid silently in the dark with 154 others.

Police released 10 seconds of footage of the suspect, seen from behind, walking briskly down a deserted street after opening fire inside a first-floor classroom.

“It is shocking and so terribly sad. I know the students here, many of whom were sheltering for many, many hours last night,” Smiley said later on CNN. “They’re all incredibly shaken up.”

Final exams scheduled for Sunday have been postponed, university officials said.

Brown University President Christina Paxson confirmed in a letter to community members that all 11 victims were students.

“Nine members of our community who were transported to local hospitals are all students. And we lost two students to today’s devastating gun violence,” Paxson said in the letter posted to the school’s website.

The attack is the latest incident of mass shooting in a country where attempts to restrict access to firearms face political deadlock.

“This should not be normal,” Smiley said on CNN. “This should not be the case that every community needs to prepare for something like this to happen. And I certainly never thought that it would actually happen in Providence, although we were well prepared for it.”

There have been more than 300 mass shootings in the United States so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as four or more people shot.

Brown, which has a student body of about 11,000, sent an emergency alert at 4:22 pm (2122 GMT) reporting “an active shooter near Barus and Holley Engineering,” which is home to the engineering and physics departments. Two exams had been scheduled at the time.

“Lock doors, silence phones and stay hidden until further notice,” the university said.

Law enforcement and first responders swarmed the scene, with local news station WPRI reporting “clothing and blood on the sidewalk.”

US President Donald Trump has been briefed on the shooting and called the incident a “terrible thing.”

“All we can do right now is pray for the victims,” he said.

The deadliest school shooting in US history took place at Virginia Tech on April 16, 2007, when South Korean student Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people and wounded 17 others before taking his own life.