Brown cites building age for lack of video, but president’s older home has cameras

The portion of the Brown University academic building where a gunman opened fire and killed two students didn’t have surveillance cameras because of the structure’s age, officials said Tuesday despite the official residence of the school president being older and appearing to be equipped with video monitoring. 

Officials were questioned about the lack of sufficient security cameras in the Barus & Holley engineering and physics building despite Brown’s $7.2 billion endowment during a Tuesday news conference in which they released more images of a person of interest being sought. 

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said the school added an addition to the academic building around five years ago. The new structure, which is located in the front, is equipped with cameras, he said. 

“So, there’s the back part of the building, the old part, and the front part, the new part,” Neronha told reporters. “The shooting occurs in the old part towards the back … and that older part of the building, there are fewer, if any, cameras in that location, I imagine, because it’s an older building.

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“So, as students are fleeing the area of the shooting into the new part of the building, there are cameras in that brand new building that show that chaos,” he added. 

The lack of cameras in the building has put the university in the spotlight as authorities continue to try and identify a person of interest whose image was captured on cameras outside the grounds of the Ivy League campus.

Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez said there was no clear video of the gunman from inside the engineering building where the shooting took place despite the university being equipped with 1,200 security cameras across campus. 

The Barus & Holley building was built in 1965. The seven-story, 220,000 square-foot structure houses the School of Engineering and the physics department. 

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It includes 117 laboratories, 150 offices, 15 classrooms, 29 laboratory classrooms and 3 lecture halls, according to the university’s website. 

The Elizabeth Hazard Sturges House, the school president’s official residence, is a Gregorian Revival-style house that was built in 1922 and sold to the university in 1947, according to The Brown Daily Herald. 

A view on Google Maps and images on other websites show what appear to be security cameras installed on the home. It wasn’t clear how many cameras are installed at the home or if any are installed inside.

Fox News Digital has reached out to the university. 

Neronha noted that the shooting happened at the “very edge” of the building that’s on the “very edge” of the campus.

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“So, as those of you who know Providence know, you are very quickly into a residential neighborhood, which is why the video footage you’re seeing of this … person of interest movements pre- and post-shooting are in that neighborhood.”

On its website, the university states that it devotes 1% of the construction budget of all new buildings and major renovations to the commission of artwork for the building or grounds as part of its “Percent-for-Art” program.