Hoisting guitar cases and luggage, college students headed home for the holidays early. In the shopping district just off the Woonasquatucket River, Christmas lights shone down on empty, icy streets. The wind blew flurries of snow off campus roofs as darkness settled in.
Days had passed since a gunman killed two students and injured nine others on Saturday in an engineering building at Brown University in Providence, R.I. A suspect was still yet to be found, and fear and anxiety in and around the Brown campus were escalating as the manhunt stretched into a third day. With final exams and classes canceled, many students who worried about their safety fled, even as the school increased security measures on campus.
“Everyone’s on edge,” said Theo Coben, 19, a Brown sophomore who took cover in a campus bathroom in response to a false alarm after the shooting.
As the 48-hour mark passed on Monday, the authorities renewed their efforts to find the gunman. F.B.I. ballistics experts worked to recreate the scene. The police knocked on doors asking for security camera footage, searched back alleys and kicked through fields of snow.
At yet another news conference, the authorities promised on Monday that they were receiving video clips of the possible suspect, and they shared new images and footage of the man they were seeking, with his face covered. The F.B.I. offered a $50,000 reward for information leading to the gunman’s arrest and conviction.
“The sooner we can identify that person, the sooner we can, I think, blow this case open,” Attorney General Peter F. Neronha of Rhode Island said on Monday evening.
Detectives were combing through and around an urban campus, up against short days and frigid temperatures in a community stricken by grief as residents mourned the losses of the two students killed in the shooting: MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, 18, and Ella Cook, 19.
And after the reversal of what initially seemed like a breakthrough in the case — officials had detained a 24-year-old man on Sunday whom they released after determining that he was not a “person of interest” — both the authorities and residents were growing weary as the search continued.
It is rare for a gunman in a high-profile shooting to be at large for so long. In school shootings in the United States, a large proportion of the attackers end up dead, killed by the police or by self-inflicted wounds, or are captured at the scene.
According to the Violence Project, which tracks homicides on college campuses dating back to 2000, there have been 30 attacks that resulted in the death of two or more people. Of those, 27 percent of the perpetrators killed themselves, 10 percent were killed by the police, 13 percent were arrested at the scene, and 47 percent were arrested after fleeing. In seven of the highest-profile campus shootings over the years, the perpetrators killed themselves, most before the police even reached them, according to a list compiled by David Riedman, an expert on school shootings.
On Monday, the news of a killer on the loose in Providence prompted parents to keep schoolchildren home. False alarms roiled the Brown campus, like the one that made Mr. Coben take cover in a campus bathroom on Sunday night, after the authorities released the man they had initially detained.
Mr. Coben recalled thinking, “Oh, here we go again.” He called campus security for an escort back to his dorm.
Miriam Davison, an 18-year-old freshman from Los Angeles, was wheeling a suitcase near the campus green on Monday afternoon, heading for the airport.
“I think it’s going to be difficult to return in January, knowing what has happened,” she said, adding, “I’m going to be a bit more scared to walk around.”
Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Irineo Cabreros and Philip Eil contributed reporting from Providence, R.I.
Shaila Dewan covers criminal justice — policing, courts and prisons — across the country. She has been a journalist for 25 years.
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