Following a memorial service this weekend for the students slain in December’s mass shooting at Brown University, the city of Providence released a trove of records on Monday that offer a glimpse into the police response.
The newly released materials include audio from 911 calls and radio dispatches, as well as a limited selection of body camera footage.
Among the earliest files are a recording of a Brown University police officer reporting the shooting to the Providence police at 4:07 p.m on Saturday, Dec. 13. Four minutes later, campus police called back to offer a description of a suspect who was “wearing all black and a ski mask, unknown travel direction.”
The description wound up being slightly inaccurate. The shooter wore a two-toned jacket and a surgical mask. In general, the files show how little information first responders had when they first arrived at Brown.
The body camera footage comes from the “officer in charge” of the initial police response, who is not identified. The footage begins roughly 10 minutes after the first 911 call and depicts a chaotic scene as police try to secure the Barus & Holley engineering building where the shooting took place. Much of the video footage is blacked out, and portions of its audio are beeped out as well. The video does not include any footage of Room 166, the crowded lecture hall where the shooter opened fire and injured 11 students, killing two of them.
The public records released Monday were redacted to avoid the most graphic images, according to city officials. The city released the records in response to public records requests, and did not include body camera footage from the many other officers who responded, or investigative records from the federal agencies that partnered with the Providence Police Department. A spokesperson said city officials waited to fulfill records requests until after a memorial service was held on Sunday, out of respect for the victims’ families.
One of the Providence Police Department’s reports noted how Brown’s security surveillance system initially left investigators with only a limited look at the shooter.
“It should be noted that the Barus & Holley building is equipped with only two exterior cameras but has multiple entrances/exits and areas of ingress and egress,” Detective Raymond Majeau wrote. “Interior cameras do not cover Room 166 and the hallways immediately surrounding it.”
Majeau’s report offers some granular insights into how investigators got onto the trail of the shooter, Claudio Neves Valente, a former graduate student who dropped out of Brown’s physics department in 2001. It emphasizes the contributions of an anonymous tipster, who interacted with Valente on Brown’s campus hours before the shooting and found him suspicious.
The tipster later posted on Reddit describing Valente’s rental car, which enabled investigators to find identifying information about Valente at a rental car agency in Boston.
Other investigative breakthroughs are left unexplained in the Providence Police Department’s documents. Majeau does not specify how investigators learned that Valente attended university in Portugal with Nuno Loureiro, an MIT physics professor who investigators say was killed by Valente the day after the mass shooting at Brown.
Majeau’s report also doesn’t mention how investigators tracked Valente’s credit card spending to a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, where Valente was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
