The person who killed two people and injured nine in the Dec. 13 shooting at Brown University didn’t appear to have a hard time accessing the first-floor lecture hall in the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building, reports show.
The building had few security cameras in the area outside the classroom, and the doors were unlocked, according to reports.
“He went in basically without anyone noticing anything,” Thomas Verdi, a former Providence chief of police who now oversees the city’s revenue department, said in a Providence Journal report. “He … knew the building. He knew the area. And I would not be surprised if he was a student, former student, worker.”
“There just weren't a lot of cameras in that Brown building,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said in a separate Providence Journal report. He described the seven-story building where the shooting took place as “an old building attached to a new one.” The building was renovated in 2013 and has more than 100 laboratories and just as many classrooms and offices, according to information on the renovations.
Although the building was open, students needed to scan badges to access classrooms and labs, school officials said. But hall traffic on that Saturday afternoon was unusually heavy because of the number of students either taking exams or preparing for them, according to reports.
“The shooting occurred during one of the busiest moments of the academic calendar,” Politico reported.
There was "probably a lot of traffic," Brown University Provost Francis Doyle said in an NPR report.
The shooting site is a lecture hall with tiered rows of seats.
“The room has stadium seating with doors that enter at the top,” said Rachel Friedberg, a professor whose teaching assistant was conducting an exam review for one of her economics classes when the gunman accessed the room. The teaching assistant told her that the gunman “came in the doors, yelled something – he couldn't remember what he yelled – and started shooting,” Friedberg said in an Ocean State Media report.
Students started scrambling to get away, Friedberg said. They were “trying to get lower down in the stadium seating.”
One of Friedberg’s classes, Principles of Economics, is the most heavily attended class at Brown, taken by half of the undergraduate students, according to Frieberg’s university biography page.
The New York Times identified the teaching assistant as Joseph Oduro. “The students in the middle were impacted the most,” Oduro told the Times. “Many of them were lying there and they were not moving. I have no idea how many.”
A person of interest identified the day after the shooting has been released. Officials have not publicly disclosed any other suspect. Closed circuit television images that officials released show a person dressed in black walking away from the campus.
The incident is one of at least 75 school shootings in the U.S. this year, CNN reported. As of Dec. 13, there have been at least 392 mass shootings and 13,955 shooting deaths nationwide, CNN reported based on data from Gun Violence Archive.
