Hunt continues for gunman who killed 2 Brown University students, injured 9 people

The Providence university remained in lockdown several hours after a suspect with a firearm entered a building where students were taking exams. Streets around the campus were packed with emergency vehicles hours after the shooting and security was heightened around the city as law enforcement agencies continued their manhunt.

The suspect remained at large, officials said, as police worked with agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to search streets and buildings around the campus to find the individual.

Providence Deputy Police Chief Timothy O'Hara said the suspect had not been identified.

Officials said they would release a video of the suspect, a male possibly in his 30s and dressed in black, who O'Hara said may have been wearing a mask. He said officials had retrieved shell casings from the scene of the shooting, but that police were not prepared to release details.

Officials said the gunman escaped after shooting students in Brown's Barus & Holley engineering building, where outer doors had been unlocked while exams were taking place.

"We are a week and a half away from Christmas. And two people died today," Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said earlier in the evening. "So please pray for those families."

Seven of the nine wounded were listed as critical, according to Brown University Health.

Brown, located on College Hill in Rhode Island's state capital, has hundreds of buildings, including lecture halls, laboratories and dormitories. The shooting suspect is thought to have fled, according to local officials, along a normally bustling street of restaurants and coffee shops.

"This is the day one hopes never happens, and it has," Brown's President Christina Paxson told reporters, confirming all or nearly all of the victims were students.

Under Desks For Hours 

As news of the shooting spread, the school told students to shelter in place.

Brown student Chiang-Heng Chien told local TV station WJAR he was working in a lab with three other students when he saw the text about the active shooter situation a block away. They waited under desks for about two hours, he said.

Rhode Island Governor Daniel McKee vowed that the shooter would be brought to justice. "We're going to make sure that we catch the individual that brought so much suffering to so many people."

The search for the suspect was complicated by throngs of holiday shoppers and thousands of people attending concerts and events on a weekend night, local officials told reporters. Federal law enforcement and police from surrounding cities and towns were assisting in the search, officials said. According to local news reports, venues across the city were bringing in extra security.

Police were scouring videos and calling for information from witnesses or others in their search for the suspect.

"Some tips have been coming in. We have been running them down," O'Hara said. "None of them have worked out for us yet."

President Donald Trump told reporters at the White House that he had been briefed on the situation, which he called "terrible."

"All we can do right now is pray for the victims and for those that were very badly hurt."

Compared to many countries, mass shootings in schools, workplaces, and places of worship are more common in the U.S., which has some of the most permissive gun laws in the developed world. The Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as any incident in which four or more victims have been shot, has counted 389 of them this year in the U.S., including at least six such shootings at schools.

Last year the U.S. had more than 500 mass shootings, according to the archive.