man held as person of interest in Rhode Island

A man was taken into custody on Sunday at a Rhode Island hotel and held as a “person of interest” in connection with the Brown University shooting case. It killed two students dead and nine wounded amid year-end final exams at the Ivy League school, authorities said.
Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said at a midday news conference that the person detained in connection with Saturday’s gun violence was in his 20s.
Suspect traced using mobile dataA person the name of Benjamin W. Erickson served as a US Army infantryman from May 2021 to November 2024, leaving the service with the rank of special without ever being deployed, military officials told Reuters.
But they could not confirm whether he was the man detained over the Brown University shooting. FBI Director Kash Patel earlier Sunday said in a post on X that the person of interest had been detained in a hotel room in the Rhode Island town of Coventry, a 30-minute drive from the Brown campus.
An FBI team specialising in cellular data analysis used geolocation information to track the suspect, Patel said.
The shooting occurred on Saturday afternoon inside a classroom at the Barus & Holley engineering building, a seven-storey complex housing Brown University’s School of Engineering. University President Chrina Paxson said she was told that nearly all the victims were students.
Final exams were underway at the time of the attack when two students were shot dead while eight others suffered gunshot wounds, most of them critical but stable. A ninth person was injured bullet fragments, officials said. However, it is yet to be established whether the ninth injured is a student or not.