Providence police on Monday released body camera footage, emergency call audio, and radio traffic from the December 13 mass shooting at Brown University that killed two students and wounded nine others — materials that reveal a chaotic, minutes-long gap between the first reports of gunfire and the formal declaration of an active shooter situation.
The footage captures officers conducting a methodical, floor-by-floor search of the Barus & Holley building, where a gunman opened fire inside Tanner Auditorium during an economics exam review session. Eighteen-year-old Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and nineteen-year-old Ella Cook were shot and killed. Nine other victims were transported to Rhode Island Hospital with gunshot wounds.
According to Fox News, the shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente, was never apprehended alive. FBI SWAT personnel later found him dead inside a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The timeline embedded in the released materials tells its own story. Brown University Police began communicating with Providence emergency dispatch shortly after 4:00 p.m. By approximately 4:11 p.m., a caller relayed a suspect description — an individual wearing all black and a ski mask, direction of travel unknown. Five more minutes passed before the officer in charge formally advised dispatch of what was already underway:
"Be advised, it's an active shooter situation."
That was 4:16 p.m. — roughly sixteen minutes after the first communications hit dispatch. In an active shooter scenario, seconds determine whether the wounded survive. Minutes determine whether the shooter escapes.
Neves-Valente did escape. He slipped through whatever perimeter existed, made it out of Providence, and ultimately turned up dead in a storage unit across state lines in New Hampshire. The released materials do not clarify how investigators connected him to that location or how much time elapsed between the shooting and the discovery of his body.
Neves-Valente's connection to Brown University was distant in every sense. He had attended the school from 2000 to 2001 as part of a PhD program in physics, then formally withdrew in the fall of 2003. More than two decades separated his time on campus from the December attack.
No motive has been stated or referenced in any of the released materials. No connection between Neves-Valente and the economics exam review session — or any of the specific victims — has been established publicly. A former physics PhD student who left the university twenty years ago walked into an undergraduate economics review and opened fire. That void of explanation is its own kind of horror.
The police incident report, also newly released, does not appear to fill those gaps. What it does confirm is the grim scene inside Room 166: Umurzokov was found deceased near the upper entry door of the auditorium. Cook was found dead on the floor between the aisles.
Detectives showed still images from surveillance video to several shooting victims in an effort to identify the gunman. The process worked — but the human cost of that identification is visible in the details.
One female victim told detectives she had gotten a good look at the shooter. When shown a photograph of Neves-Valente, she froze. She physically pushed back, became visibly emotional, teared up, and shook before confirming the image showed the man who shot her. Two other victims were separately shown images and also identified Neves-Valente as the shooter.
These are not clinical data points. These are young people forced to stare at a photograph of the man who tried to kill them while still processing gunshot wounds in a hospital. The identification was necessary. That doesn't make it less brutal.
Portions of the released materials were redacted. Providence police cited several justifications:
Some of that is reasonable. Shielding victims from having their worst moments broadcast publicly is a defensible choice. But redactions also function as a gate — and in a case where the shooter escaped the building, crossed state lines, and was only found dead later, the public has a legitimate interest in understanding exactly what happened in those critical early minutes.
The sixteen-minute gap between the first dispatch communication and the formal active shooter declaration demands scrutiny. Was there confusion about the nature of the threat? Were protocols followed correctly? Did the delay in classification affect the response posture — and did that posture contribute to Neves-Valente's escape?
Those questions won't answer themselves, and redacted footage won't answer them either.
Every mass shooting produces the same cycle: horror, vigils, calls for action, then a slow fade until the next one. What rarely survives that cycle is accountability for the specific institutional failures that shaped the specific outcome.
At Brown, the specific failure is concrete. A shooter entered a campus building, killed two students, wounded nine others, and walked out. He was not stopped at the scene. He was not apprehended fleeing. He was found dead in another state, apparently by his own hand, inside a storage facility that investigators somehow connected to him through means that remain unexplained.
The bodycam footage shows officers searching the building floor by floor — a necessary and dangerous task. No one questions the courage of the officers who entered that building, not knowing if the shooter was still inside. But courage in the aftermath is different from a system that prevents escape in the moment.
Two students — Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook — walked into an exam review and never walked out. Nine others were left on stretchers. The man who did it to them died on his own terms, in his own time, in a storage unit in New Hampshire.
The footage is public now. The answers still aren't.