By Ryan Patrick Jones
Dec 22 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Education on Monday said it was reviewing safety at Brown University in response to a mass shooting on the campus earlier this month.
Federal
officials will scrutinize Brown’s emergency notification and campus surveillance systems, the department said in a statement. Almost a week after the shooting, the suspect - who also was accused of killing an MIT professor in the Boston area - was found dead.
Brown's president, Christina Paxson, has said her institution is “deeply committed” to campus safety and security. She has said one of her university's two emergency notification systems sent text messages and emails to 20,000 individuals after the shooting. She has also said that a second siren system was not set off for fear it would prompt people to rush for safety into the building where the shooting occurred.
Paxson also said last week the campus has 1,200 security cameras. Officials said the attack occurred in an older part of a facility that had few or no cameras.
President Donald Trump had previously criticized the university in a Truth Social post for having “so few Security Cameras.”
The suspect, identified as Claudio Neves Valente, 48, entered a building used for Brown's engineering and physics programs on December 13 and fired at least 44 rounds from his 9 mm pistol, killing two students and wounding nine, according to police in Providence, Rhode Island.
He was found dead in a storage rental facility in Salem, New Hampshire, after a five-day manhunt.
The Education Department has ordered Brown to submit extensive records by January 30, including crime logs, annual security reports and internal protocols relating to emergency notifications and active shooter response.
The review will look at whether the school violated a law that requires universities to meet certain campus safety and security requirements as a condition of receiving federal student aid.
(Reporting by Christian Martinez in Los Angeles and Ryan Patrick Jones in Toronto; Editing by Chris Reese, Donna Bryson and Matthew Lewis)
