1 month ago
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Tension mixed with grief and frustration in Providence on Monday around the Brown University campus, after authorities said they were still searching for a suspect who killed two students.
Nine additional students were injured in Saturday’s shooting on the Ivy League campus in Rhode Island, which is woven into the heart of the city’s East Side neighborhood, a community that to many feels more like a small town than the capital city of the smallest state in the US.
The sound of a helicopter hovering overhead mixed with sirens throughout the day as federal and local law enforcement officers could be seen canvassing businesses to ask for the location of cameras and sweeping properties in the neighborhood with a dog.
“It’s so tense,” said Jennifer Kandarian, manager of Books on the Square, a short walk from where the shooting occurred. She and many other residents woke to the news that authorities were releasing a man they had detained the day before.
“Everybody’s aware that a horrible thing happened, and the person’s still not caught,” Kandarian said Monday afternoon. “You can’t even fathom the tragedy.”
Earlier in the day, her staff locked the store’s doors as rumors flew about reports of another shooting in an apartment complex nearby. Providence police later said in a post on X that the reports were unfounded: the loud noise came from a boiler backfiring in an apartment building. But, they said, they set up a perimeter around the area and cleared the building as a precaution.
The incident left residents even more on edge as they grappled with the reality that the person responsible for the crime was still at large. Several private schools closed as a precaution, though public schools remained opened with what authorities said would be increased security. Later in the day, they canceled all after-school activities.
On Monday evening, authorities released video footage of a new person of interest as the manhunt continued and tensions remained high.
“It is going to be hard for my city to feel safe going forward. This has shaken us,” the mayor, Brett Smiley, said at an evening news conference. “This is a process to restore our sense of safety. But we’re going to take those a step at a time.”
He said the city would be providing a noted visible police presence to reassure the public, whether they are families taking children to school or people going to work.
In businesses around campus, far fewer people than usual were out, and some stores were closed as shoppers and workers avoided the area as the manhunt continued.
“It could be anyone,” said Jamiere Barr, who works at the Sneaker Junkies shoe store on a commercial strip that runs alongside campus. “He could still be out here. He could be on the street right now. You never know.”
A few blocks away, outside the building where the shooting happened on Saturday afternoon, mourners left flowers, shared tears and hugs and comforted one another. One person left a note: “BROWN Community. Your Providence neighbors love you.”
Carlos Ponce De Leon, who graduated from Brown last year, said he was on the second floor of the building during the shooting, one floor up from where the attack occurred.
“I’m so incredibly lucky to be here,” Ponce De Leon said.
To cope with all that had happened, he went to his job at Rhode Island hospital - the same hospital where injured Brown students are still being cared for – where he is a researcher.
“Doing my best to be productive and give back to the community that has helped this week so much has, I think, been the healthiest thing to do for me,” he said.
Patricia Rodarte attended Brown as an undergraduate and for medical school, and is now a surgery resident at Rhode Island hospital. She had stopped by with her sister to leave flowers and reflect on the students who were there that day.
Rodarte is originally from El Paso, Texas, and said it was the second time she had had to go to a memorial for a mass shooting in a place she loves. The first was in 2019, when a gunman shot 45 people, killing 23, in a Walmart in her home town.
Both places, though so different, are equally affected, she said.
“This was a safe place, in this ivory tower,” Rodarte said. “But no place really is safe in the current landscape that we’re in.”
