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On Monday, new video footage emerged from the tragic Brown University shooting, which resulted in the deaths of two students and left nine others injured. In releasing this material, city officials took care to edit out the most graphic and violent scenes to protect the victims and uphold the community’s trust.
“It is of utmost importance that Providence remains transparent, accountable, and adherent to the state’s Access to Public Records Act,” stated Providence Mayor Brett Smiley. He acknowledged the difficult balance between transparency and the potential harm these images could cause to victims, families, and neighbors still grappling with the aftermath of this tragedy.
Following the December incident, media outlets both within the United States and internationally had been persistently seeking access to body camera videos, audio files, and other records related to the shooting.
The newly disclosed footage includes audio of a campus police officer alerting city police at 4:07 p.m., saying, “This is Brown police. We have confirmed gunshots at 184 Hope Street. We do have a victim but we do not know where they are.”
Just four minutes later, a follow-up call from campus police provided a description of a suspect: “We have a suspect description, wearing all black and a ski mask, unknown travel direction.”
Separately, the city released roughly 20 minutes of body camera footage of the officer in charge of the initial response to the shooting. The heavily redacted footage shows a chaotic and confusing scene of officers not knowing if the shooter was still in the building and attempts to quickly find a safe spot to send the students evacuated from the building. Scattered backpacks, gloves and other items can be seen as officers scour the building looking for a possible shooter and victims.
“Let’s get these rescues in, where are we staging rescue?” the officer, who was not identified, says in the video.
He later cautions other officers, “Shooter might still be in the building, so use caution alright.”
Long portions of the video are either blacked out or with the audio redacted. The video is often blocked by the officer’s arms in front of the camera. The city did not release any other body camera footage.
Other audio captures officers describing a possible sighting of the shooter on the second floor of another building and a report of a suspect being taken into custody. It’s unclear when officers realized they had the wrong person in custody, but within minutes, one officer instructs them “We’re gonna work on the premise that that’s not him. We’re gonna conduct a secondary search.”
The city released those records Monday, saying they waited at the request of the victims families until after a memorial service was held the previous week on Brown’s campus.
On Dec. 13, gunman Claudio Neves Valente, 48, entered a study session in a Brown academic building and opened fire on students, killing 19-year-old sophomore Ella Cook and 18-year-old freshman MukhammadAziz Umurzokov and wounding nine others.
A newly released police incident report reiterated the emotional moments law enforcement had previously shared about hospitalized victims responding to photos of the suspected shooter.
One victim “quickly froze, physically pushed back” and began crying and shaking as she confirmed the image matched the person who shot her. Another victim “took a deep breath, shut his eyes, changed his breathing pattern and confirmed that the shooter he saw in the hallway appeared to be the person in the photos presented.”
Authorities say Neves Valente, who had been a graduate student at Brown studying physics during the 2000-01 school year, also fatally shot Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro at Loureiro’s Boston-area home.
Neves Valente, who had attended school with Loureiro in Portugal in the 1990s, was found dead days after the shooting in a New Hampshire storage facility.
The Justice Department has since said Neves Valente planned the attack for years and left behind videos in which he confessed to the killings but gave no motive. The FBI recovered the electronic device containing the series of videos during a search of the storage facility where Neves Valente’s body was found.
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