Information came pouring in second by second after a shooter first opened fire at Brown University, starting in chaos but trickling to a stall as authorities spent hours combing the campus for a suspect, call records from that day show.
Two students were killed and nine others were injured in the shooting Dec. 13. Investigators later identified the gunman as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, whose body was found in a storage locker in New Hampshire days later in what officials believe was a suicide after a professor who worked for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was killed.
Dispatch logs from the Providence police and fire departments obtained by NBC News show a flurry of reports beginning at 4:06 p.m. and continuing late into the evening as Brown’s campus remained on lockdown for hours.
At 4:06:45 p.m. a dispatcher reported a call that was classified as a “shooting” within seconds, according to the logs.
At 4:06:59, the same dispatcher reported a person had been shot. Over the next 30 seconds, the incident location was updated multiple times, according to the logs. At the exact same time, another dispatcher was getting a call of shots fired at Barus and Holley, the engineering building where students were studying for finals.
By 4:11:13, the dispatch logs included reports that two males had been shot, one in a shoulder and the other in the abdomen.
At 4:12:02, a dispatcher recorded a report of a suspect wearing all black with a mask. Thirteen seconds later, another dispatcher logged a similar description.
At 4:13:37, a dispatcher relayed a report that a female had been shot multiple times at Barus Hall. Less than two minutes later, at 4:15:01, a caller told dispatchers they had heard 10 shots on the first floor while sheltering in place.
Six victims were confirmed by 4:15, according to the logs.
At 4:19:19, a caller reported a woman outside the library who had been shot and needed medical attention. Two minutes later, another caller reported what appeared to be the same woman shot in the leg outside the library.
Two dispatchers logged reports of a possible suspect inside a building 10 seconds apart at 4:22 p.m. — only to mark “no suspect yet” less than two minutes later. The logs also show police clearing the scene, finding roughly 200 students inside a single room and others hiding alone in bathrooms.
Hours after the first reports of gunfire, authorities were still conducting secondary searches at the school. Logs show responders reporting a “live victim” at 6:21:59 p.m.
At about 7:30, buses were dispatched to take families to a reunification center, according to the logs.
Brown University’s shelter-in-place order would not be lifted until the next morning. By then, authorities had shifted from securing the scene to focusing on identifying and locating the suspect, authorities later indicated.
A person of interest was detained the next morning but was released later that day after Rhode Island officials said evidence pointed elsewhere.
Five days after the shooting, a judge signed an arrest warrant for Neves Valente in connection with the attack.
Neves Valente was a native of Portugal who graduated at the top of his class and moved to the U.S. to attend Brown from August 2000 to spring 2001 on a student visa in the physics Ph.D. program. He requested a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and eventually withdrew in 2003, according to a Providence police affidavit.
Authorities are still unclear why he targeted the school.
“Why Brown? I think that is a mystery,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said. He added: “I don’t think we have any idea why now, or why Brown, why these students, why this classroom. That is really unknown to us.”