Students return to Brown University amid questions over security policies that enabled mass shooting
Brown University began a new semester on Tuesday morning as the campus still remains shaken by a mass shooting that took the lives of two students and sent nine injured students to the hospital.
Questions remain surrounding the security of Brown’s campus after controversial security measures allowed a killer to successfully carry out a deadly shooting, and a failed immediate apprehension let the gunman go on to take the life of an MIT professor days after the attack at the Ivy League school.
Jack DiPrimio, a graduate student at Brown University, says being back at school for the spring semester has presented challenges following the shooting.
"Being back at the place where [this incident] transpired a month ago, it feels so fresh and raw," DiPrimio told Fox News Digital. "The memorials are beautiful, but they’re also really hard to walk by because I get emotional seeing [Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov] and [Ella Cook’s] faces. It’s weird to see your friend’s [face] in a memorial."
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Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, was the gunman authorities say was responsible for the shootings. The Department of Justice released a transcript of a recording Neves-Valente made following the attack, which reveals he had been plotting the shooting for some time.
"It's done. It was, it was six months, man. Not six months, six semesters. Uh. I had already planned this for a little more," the transcript reads. "It was all a little incompetent but at least something was done."
Nuno Loureiro, a professor at MIT, and Brown University students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov were victims of Neves Valente’s multiple attacks.
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Brown University faced intense scrutiny over how the shooter escaped local authorities, and how his identity was mainly discovered due to an interaction with a homeless man who was living on campus.
The homeless man, known by the pseudonym John, had been living in the basement of Brown’s Barus and Holley engineering building. When police could not identify him themselves, they asked the public via social media to help locate someone who had been near the actual person of interest.
It is unclear whether the man is still living on the Ivy League campus.
The security policies put in place by Brown were criticized by the Trump administration.
"Brown’s campus surveillance and security system may not have been up to appropriate standards, allowing the suspect to flee while the university seemed unable to provide helpful information about the profile of the alleged assassin," a Dec. 22 press release from the Department of Education reads.
"Additionally, many Brown students and staff reported that the university’s emergency notifications about the active shooter were delayed, raising significant concerns about their safety alert system. If true, these shortcomings constitute serious breaches of Brown’s responsibilities under federal law," the statement continues.
Brown University president Christina Paxson issued a statement the week after the shooting with details on updated security measures, and the university said it plans to implement a stricter ID card policy.
"In addition, Barus & Holley lecture halls 166 and 168, eight immediately adjacent and proximate classrooms (155 through 165), and the immediately adjacent hallways, restrooms and entrances to that area of Barus & Holley will be closed and inaccessible to everyone," the school’s administrative officials wrote to the Brown community in a Jan. 16 email obtained by Brown Daily Herald.
Paxson said that there would also be a rapid response team designed to focus on safety, an after-action review to assess the events leading up to the shooting, and conduct an external security assessment of the "perimeter of buildings, access points, cameras and technology, and other infrastructure conditions" in a statement made the week after the shooting.
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DiPrimio hopes that the university will learn from the previous incident, and noted he has seen changes on campus.
"There’s a lot of new emergency resources, emergency buttons on campus. I’m seeing a lot more security, physically on the ground," said DiPrimio. "I hope Brown can learn and move forward from this. I hope that we come together as a community, and we don’t tear each other apart."
As Brown University students return to campus, some have decided to organize a new group called "Students Demand Action at Brown University." The group will gather for its first meeting of the semester on Wednesday, Jan. 21, according to the group’s social media.
"I want to understand the strategy moving forward to piece together what specific actions can be taken in Rhode Island or New England," said DiPrimio. "I want to see changes federally on magazine capacity laws, but I think we need to start with piecemeal. Changes we can actually accomplish in a bipartisan way."
Fox News Digital reached out to Brown University but did not receive a response in time for publication.