A person of interest has been released in the Brown University shooting, which a law enforcement analyst said was a “sobering reset” of the investigation in its crucial early stages.
FBI Director Kash Patel had announced that a person of interest had been detained Sunday, but police released him hours later, saying the evidence “now points in a different direction.” Former Secret Service agent Jonathan Wackrow told “CNN News Central” that investigators were basically starting over from scratch.
“Listen to that sigh of relief that authorities had announced when they stated that they had a person of interest in custody has really been replaced by this sobering reset in the entire investigation, and the reality is it brings investigators back to square one,” Wackrow said.
“They have no suspect in custody, and, really, they’re not even intimating that they have somebody that they’re even looking at, and the challenge is that as time goes on, this investigation gets significantly harder. So this is a really hard reset going back to square one, where they have to go back and reassess every single lead that they had.”
Wackrow said investigators were now reassessing the ballistic evidence and digital leads they’ve gathered since the shootings Saturday afternoon, which left two students dead and nine others injured.
“They have to go back through that surveillance video and dig deeper,” Wackrow said. “They have to dig deeper into the neighborhood and to the community, and anything that will give us a better image of who this suspect potentially is and where they’re going. So, again, there is a monumental task ahead with a lot of challenges around time, distance and resources that are up against law enforcement investigators this morning.”
Investigators believe the shooter was targeting a specific individual or the university itself, but Wackrow said they have little indication of who that gunman might be.
“Time has gone by now,” he said. “We haven’t seen any indication of a secondary threat or a targeted group that’s working together. So with that in mind, investigators really have to move quickly through all of the evidence that they do have to ensure that they identify a suspect and bring that suspect into custody quickly.”
The investigation will only get more difficult as time passes, Wackrow said.
“Immediately the shooter created that time and distance by evading police in the moments after the attack, and so the challenge for law enforcement is they allowed for potentially physical evidence to degrade. Digital signals will also go cold,” Wackrow said. “As they go back to re-interview witnesses, many of which have now gone home for the holidays, the memories start fading. Those details that are really important in the aftermath of an incident around, you know, maybe the a particular gait that the person walked in or, you know, the way that they comported themselves as they were walking through a hallway or out on the street, they start losing that fidelity.”
“So it puts investigators up to a significant challenge on how are they going to reset this investigation?” he added. “And final point here is, in the immediate aftermath, we saw this surge of federal, state and local resources all converging on Brown University, right where you’re standing. Look around – they’re not there anymore. So the challenge is, is with this monumental task of resetting the investigation, their resources are limited right now, and they have to rebuild those resources to lead this investigation forward.”
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