A week after memorial activities on Brown’s campus, Providence released additional public records tied to the fatal Dec. 13 shooting that killed two students and injured nine others, including new video footage and audio from the day of the attack, officials said Monday. Providence Mayor Brett Smiley described the release as an attempt to meet media and public requests for transparency while limiting what he said could be serious negative effects from releasing the most graphic material.
Smiley said city officials had withheld other footage and redacted portions after receiving requests for body camera video, audio clips and other public-records materials that began soon after the shooting in mid-December. He said releasing some of the information had “potential, really serious downside effects,” while the city still aimed to respond to what he characterized as the public’s right to know what happened.
The newly released materials include recorded radio audio in which a campus police officer contacts city police to report confirmed gunshots at 184 Hope Street. Four minutes later, the same channel carried a campus police update that included a suspect description: the officer said the suspect was wearing all black and a ski mask, and that officers did not know the person’s travel direction.
Separate from the radio audio, the city released about 20 minutes of heavily redacted body-camera video from the officer in charge of the initial response. In the footage, city officials said officers dealt with a chaotic and shifting situation in which they did not know whether the shooter was still in the building, while they worked quickly to find safe staging points to evacuate students.
In the body-camera footage, the officer coordinating rescues told other officers about logistics for where to stage, and later cautioned that the shooter might still be inside. Much of the recording is blacked out or has audio redacted, and Smiley and city officials said they made that decision with city lawyers, describing the released material as the most “comprehensive” view the city planned to provide.
Smiley said that even if additional video were released, he argued it would not answer the deeper question of why the shooter chose to attack the university. He said the video releases do not address motivation and added that releasing more footage was not expected to resolve the issue the public most wanted clarified.
The city released the records Monday, officials said, after waiting at the request of victims’ families until after a memorial service held the week before on Brown’s campus. Smiley said he had spoken to the victims and their families in recent days, and he described some families as fearing that releases like Monday’s could make it harder for them to move forward.
Alongside the video and audio, Monday’s materials also included details from a police incident report. The report described emotional moments involving hospitalized victims responding to photos of the suspected shooter, including one victim who “quickly froze” and began crying and shaking when confirming that an image matched the person who shot her, and another victim who “took a deep breath,” shut his eyes, changed his breathing and confirmed a person he saw in a hallway appeared to be the shooter in photos presented.
Authorities said Claudio Neves Valente, 48, entered a Brown academic building and opened fire during a study session on Dec. 13, killing 19-year-old Ella Cook and 18-year-old MukhammadAziz Umurzokov and injuring nine others. The Justice Department said Neves Valente planned the attack for years and left behind videos in which he confessed to the killings but gave no motive, and the FBI recovered the electronic device containing those videos from a New Hampshire storage facility where his body was found.