The man held as a “person of interest” in the Brown University shooting that left two students dead and nine injured will be released from custody, authorities said on Sunday night.

Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said earlier at a midday news conference that a man in his 20s had been taken into custody in connection with Saturday’s gun violence but gave no further details.

But at a late-night news conference hours later, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley and other state and local officials told reporters the man detained would be released from custody, saying the investigation was going into a “different direction”.

“We have not yet solved this case, but I am confident we are going to do that in the near future,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said.

Officials declined to elaborate on why the man who was taken into custody was detained in the first place.

“There was a quantum of evidence which justified detaining this person as a person of interest,” Neronha said, adding that investigators later determined there was “no basis to believe that he’s a person of interest, so … he’s being released”.

Authorities said they believed an unidentified person pictured in surveillance footage to be the person they were still looking for.

FBI Director Kash Patel said earlier on Sunday 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.

While the killer was presumed to remain at large, authorities said on Sunday night they would not reimpose an initial shelter-in-place order for the campus and surrounding community that had been lifted.

The mass shooting — the latest of nearly 400 in the US this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive — shook the community at the university, one of the oldest in the United States.

The school cancelled exams and classes for the rest of the year, and the campus was quiet on Sunday as a light snowfall blanketed the city.

Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said that authorities, as of midday on Sunday, had not yet contacted all of the victims’ family members because some were travelling.

He invited residents to a previously planned event on Sunday to light a Christmas tree and a menorah to mark the first night of Hanukkah.

“It is quite clear that if we can come together as a community and shine a little bit of light tonight, I think there’s nothing better that we could be doing,” Smiley said.

Authorities release video of suspect

Seven people injured at Brown University were in stable condition, Smiley said. One remained in critical but stable condition, while another had been discharged, he added.

Shelter-in-place orders at the university and nearby areas were lifted on Sunday. Smiley said earlier in the day that residents should expect a visible police presence across the city.

The gunman fled after shooting students in a classroom in Brown’s Barus & Holley engineering and physics building, where outer doors had been left unlocked while exams were taking place, officials said on Saturday.

Authorities on Saturday released a short video clip of a person of interest dressed in black walking near the engineering building.

Providence Deputy Police Chief Timothy O’Hara said on Saturday the individual may have worn a mask, but officials were not certain.

Brown President Christina Paxson told reporters that all or nearly all of the victims were students, adding: “This is the day one hopes never happens, and it has.”

Students caught by surprise

Ref Bari, 22, a graduate student at Brown, said he was inside the Barus & Holley building when he heard a series of loud popping sounds that appeared to be gunfire.

Bari ran out of the building and asked another student running in the street if he could hide with her and her friends, and she agreed. They returned to her basement apartment and hid in the bathroom.

“She trusted me,” he said. “The only connection between us is we’re both students at Brown, but beyond that, we don’t know each other.”

Teaching assistant Joseph Oduro, 21, told CNN he was in a classroom that was attacked.

“The first couple of gunshots went straight to the chalkboard right where I was standing,” Oduro said. “Who knows, if I didn’t duck, maybe I’m not here today.”

A student next to him took two bullets to the leg and was due to undergo surgery on Sunday, he said.

Jack DiPrimio, another graduate student at Brown, said he was initially not concerned when the university went on lockdown because he had experienced many active-shooter drills. The drills have become more common in the US as attacks targeting students have increased.

“I had faced so many lockdowns in high school and even a few at my undergrad, so I wasn’t that worried at first,” DiPrimio said in a TikTok video after coming out of a five-hour lockdown. “Maybe I was desensitised.”