One way the Brown University attack was unusual: The gunman escaped

He could be so many people on the street: dark winter hat, dark zippered jacket, black pants. Even the gun the police say he used to open fire in a Brown University classroom on Saturday was one of the world’s most common types, a 9-millimeter handgun.

The man who carried out a rampage that killed two students and wounded nine seemed to have left little behind, other than shell casings and video snippets of a portly figure pacing past doorbell cameras in the neighborhood east of campus, his facial features concealed behind a medical mask.

The hunt has put the city, and authorities, in a tense situation, with a high-profile case and a killer in the wind. On Tuesday afternoon, as the three-day search inched toward four, they released yet another grainy image of the suspected gunman and said that they were confident that once he was identified, he could be found.

“We just need a little bit of patience, as hard as it is to say that in this really horrible context,” Peter Neronha, Rhode Island’s attorney general, said at a 5 p.m. news conference where the centerpiece was not an investigative breakthrough but a new compilation of “enhanced” surveillance video that, he admitted, was not great.

It is unusual, but not unprecedented, for searches in high-profile attacks to stretch on, dangerous as any delay may be. Three days passed before the FBI released photos of the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013, and during the ensuing search, the fugitives shot three police officers, two fatally. It took five days to capture Luigi Mangione, now accused of killing the CEO of United Healthcare one year ago.

But in apparently random, public shootings like the one at Brown, the majority of attackers kill themselves or are killed by law enforcement officers at the scene.

In cases where they do not, some suspects are at least identified well before they are found, like the man accused of a mass shooting in a bar in Anaconda, Montana, who was found a week later. In 2023, the man who carried out a shooting spree that began at a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, was found in a tractor-trailer, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, after more than two days had elapsed.

If witnesses from the day prove unhelpful, investigators may still find hope in the fact that between 60%-90% of mass attackers communicate their intent to a third party in advance, a behavior known as leakage. “There is likely to be planning and preparation and research,” said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who has studied such attacks. “There will be others that will be aware of the movement on the pathway to violence.”

But as days pass, people’s memories become clouded by news coverage and social media, said Tyrone Powers, a retired FBI agent who worked on fugitive squads. “It’s just a matter of catching somebody as quick as you can,” he said.

In Rhode Island, there is no indication that authorities know whom they are looking for, where he may be or even whether he is alive. They do not know, they said, what motivated him or whether he had any connection to Brown.

They are analyzing ballistic evidence and parsing what Chief Oscar L. Perez Jr. of the Providence Police Department described as “terabytes” of video. Yet they also made it clear that they were banking on the chance that someone would come forward with information.

They have offered a $50,000 reward, asked anyone who was in the engineering and physics building Saturday to submit to an interview and canvassed the neighborhood for witnesses. Perez urged the public to study the new video compilation with an eye to the suspect’s posture, gait and arm gestures.

“We are relying on the press and public to help get us there,” Neronha said.

The videos show the suspect in the neighborhood as early as 10:30 a.m., hours before the shooting began shortly after 4 p.m.

There have been many questions about why there was not more security video from inside the Barus and Holley engineering building, where the shooting occurred in an amphitheater-style classroom. Neronha said that the classroom was in an older part of the building, while the cameras were in the newer part. “They show things like chaos after the shooting,” he said. “What they don’t show is this person of interest.”

Still, Powers said things were far from hopeless. “This is not some high-level operative from some intelligence agency in some foreign country” who could conduct a lethal operation without a trace, he said. “Somebody knows something, and we’re going to find out who that is.”