New Footage From Brown Shooting Released

A new video from the day of the Brown University shooting that killed two students and injured nine others was released Monday, with city officials saying they had withheld other footage and redacted the most graphic, violent images to avoid harming victims. News outlets across the US had been requesting body camera footage, audio clips, and other public records shortly after the shooting took place in mid-December.

• The newly released material includes audio of a campus police officer calling city police at 4:07pm, the AP reports. "This is Brown police. We have confirmed gunshots at 184 Hope Street," the officer said. "We do have a victim but we do not know where they are." Four minutes later, campus police called back with an update: "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. Officials defended their decision, made in consultation with city lawyers, to release only one video, saying it offered the most "comprehensive" view.
• "This was a difficult process to both maintain our commitment to transparency, to respond to requests from the media and the public's right to know exactly what happened, but also balancing what we know are potential, really serious downside effects of releasing some of this information," Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said at a news conference.

• Smiley argued that releasing more videos would not answer the harder question of why the shooter chose to attack the university. "Why did this person do this? None of those videos are going to answer that question. None of them," the mayor said.
• 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.
• 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 FG 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.