President Donald Trump doubled down on blaming Brown University and not his own bumbling FBI as the hunt for the Brown University shooter stretched into its fourth day.
An unidentified suspect opened fire at about 4 p.m. Saturday inside a lecture hall where students were attending a review session for a final exam in economics, killing two students and injuring nine others, before fleeing the campus in Providence, Rhode Island.
The building had limited security camera coverage, making it difficult to follow the suspect’s movements into the surrounding neighborhood, where the shooter was then picked up on surveillance footage.
“Brown is different than maybe some universities in that it is very much integrated with a residential neighborhood,” Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said during a press conference Tuesday night. “This building is on the literal edge of the campus, and the person of interest walked out the door (and) as soon as he stepped onto the sidewalk, was no longer on campus.”
Trump, however, tried to blame the university for the fact that officials still have not identified the suspect, a stocky man wearing a face mask and a beanie who was caught on camera.
“Why did Brown University have so few Security Cameras? There can be no excuse for that. In the modern age, it just doesn’t get worse!!!” Trump wrote after midnight local time in a Truth Social post.
It wasn’t the first time the president has appeared to deflect as the FBI has struggled with the investigation. On Sunday, FBI Director Kash Patel announced on social media that a person of interest was in custody, only for authorities to then clear the person in question.
Asked on Monday why the FBI was having so much trouble identifying the shooter, Trump replied, “Well, it’s always difficult. So far, we’ve done a very good job of doing it… they’ve done it in record time,” before claiming the investigation wasn’t in the FBI’s jurisdiction.
“You’d really have to ask the school about that because this was a school problem,” he continued. “They had their own guards, their own police, their own everything. But you would have to ask that question to the school and not to the FBI.”
Patel himself wrote on social media, however, that the FBI had launched an “all-out 24/7 campaign” to arrest the shooter.
The bureau released new images of the suspect on Monday and said it was offering up to $50,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
Juliette Kayyem, a former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, told PBS News Hour that the shooting raised important questions about campus accessibility and security, but that Brown University was not responsible for catching the killer.
“The school has no arrest or investigatory authority,” she said in an interview Tuesday night. “The investigation is clearly led by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies, including the FBI.”
Patel’s premature announcement that a person of interest was in custody hurt the investigation because it forced everyone to focus on the wrong person, meaning the real suspect was able to get farther away, and evidence could have been destroyed.
“The challenge is not only did they lose time. You’re really beginning to have a community lose confidence, and that you can’t have,” Kayyem added. “It looks like they’re too divided.”
In the meantime, MAGA influencers have latched onto wild conspiracy theories about the suspect “walking like a leftist” and targeting one of the victims because she was conservative, even though witnesses said the killings appeared random.
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