What We Know About the Deadly Shooting at Brown University

The authorities are still searching for the gunman who killed two people on the Rhode Island campus.

A gunman burst into a classroom at Brown University in Rhode Island on Saturday, killing two people and wounding nine others before fleeing the campus.

The search for the attacker dragged into Tuesday after the authorities said they had released a person of interest who had been detained earlier.

The Ivy League university lifted a lockdown of its campus in Providence early Sunday, but said it had canceled all remaining classes and exams for the rest of the fall semester.

Here’s what to know about the attack:

The shooting happened during a final exam review session.

The shooting was reported at about 4 p.m. on Saturday in a room in the Barus and Holley building, where students were attending a final exam review session for an economics class. Other students inside the building were taking final exams or seeking quiet spots to study.

An alert sent by the university told students and faculty members to lock their doors, silence their phones and stay hidden because of reports of an active shooter. Many students hid in dorms, while others took shelter in the basement of a popular tea shop.

Owen Fick, a junior, described seeing heavily armed police officers in protective gear running down the street, before he rushed to a dorm room to shelter. “There were a lot of ambulances, a lot of cop cars, fire trucks,” he said. “They just had a lot of gurneys.”

Students spent the night locked in classrooms, libraries and dorms. Annelise Mages, a first-year pre-med student, was studying for her chemistry final in the Sciences Library when the shooting began.

She and dozens of other students protected themselves by lowering shades and barricading doors, using whiteboards and chairs. Ms. Mages estimated that two or three hours passed before police officers broke down the barricades and the group was moved into the building’s basement for another four to five hours.

The students who were killed were from Virginia and Alabama.

The two students killed in the shootings were identified as MukhammadAziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook.

Mr. Umurzokov, 18, from Midlothian, Va., was a naturalized American citizen who arrived in 2011 from Uzbekistan. His sisters, Rukhsora and Samara, said that he chose Brown because of its financial aid offer and that he had worked at a Wawa over the summer to earn money for a computer.

He initially came to the country to receive treatment for Chiari malformation, a condition in which spinal fluid puts pressure on the brain and spinal cord, according to his sisters and a friend, Maddox Johnson.

Mr. Umurzokov was interested in becoming a neurosurgeon to help children the way doctors had once helped him, Mr. Johnson said.

Ms. Cook, 19, a sophomore from Mountain Brook, Ala., was an accomplished piano player who was fluent in French and was vice president of the college Republican Club.

A high school classmate, Catherine Johnson, described Ms. Cook as “so smart, so studious and focused.”

She had summer jobs at an ice-cream parlor and as an assistant at an organization that runs summer study programs around the world.

The gunman is still at large.

The authorities were still searching on Tuesday for the person who attacked the campus. Law enforcement officials have not named any suspects, or mentioned potential motives. They said on Sunday that they had released a 24-year-old Wisconsin man whom they had detained earlier in the day.

“He has been cleared,” Rhode Island’s attorney general, Peter F. Neronha, said on Monday, adding that “the investigation is now focused in another direction.”

The authorities have released videos of the suspect walking along a street in dark clothing, and have asked the public for help in identifying the person. On Tuesday, the F.BI. posted what it called a video timeline of the suspect’s movements on the day of the shooting. The video, which lasts more than six minutes, includes maps and security-camera footage of the shooter walking along the street.

Mayor Brett Smiley of Providence said officials had no way of knowing if the attacker was still in the city. And Mr. Neronha indicated that there may not be video footage of the shooter inside the engineering building.

“There just weren’t a lot of cameras in that Brown building,” he said.

Officials are trying to reassure frightened students.

Officials have tried to reassure the public that they are working tirelessly to find the attacker while mourning the victims of the shooting.

“The fact that people are scared is perfectly understandable, and I imagine there’ll be some element of that until we have this person in custody,” Mr. Neronha told NPR on Tuesday morning. “And we are literally working around the clock.”

Gov. Dan McKee of Rhode Island described the shooting as “an unthinkable nightmare.”

“This is something that’s going to impact families and people’s lives for a lifetime,” he said.

Mr. Smiley, the mayor of Providence, described meeting a wounded student at a hospital who had relied on training from an active shooter drill in high school.

“We shouldn’t have to do active shooter drills, but it helped,” the mayor said, “and the reason it helped, and the reason we do these drills, is because it’s so damn frequent.”

Reporting was contributed by Dana Goldstein, Qasim Nauman, Victor Mather, Michael Levenson and Neil Vigdor.

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