Brown Student Who Survived Parkland Attack Recounts Terror as Police Release Detained ‘Person of Interest’
A Brown University sophomore who previously survived the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, has spoken out about the terror and profound anger of living through her second campus shooting event, as the Providence Police Department announced late Sunday that the “person of interest” detained in the case had been released.
Zoe Weissman, 20, a student at the Ivy League university, shared her emotional reaction to the deadly mass shooting at Brown’s Barus & Holley engineering building that killed two students and wounded nine others on Saturday. Weissman was next door to the Parkland high school during the 2018 massacre that killed 17 people.
“I’m really angry. I’m really angry that this is happening to me all over again. And I’m just in shock,” Weissman told a news outlet, describing how the events at Brown triggered deep trauma from her past. “I think mentally I feel like I’m 12 again. This feels exactly how I felt in 2018.”
Weissman is not alone in experiencing the grim reality of surviving multiple school shootings. Another Brown junior, Mia Tretta, was shot in the abdomen during the 2019 Saugus High School shooting in California. Tretta said she initially tried to convince herself the emergency alerts she received on Saturday “couldn’t be happening again.”
Police Release Detained Person of Interest
The trauma of the ongoing threat was heightened late Sunday when Providence Mayor Brett Smiley and officials announced that a 24-year-old man from Wisconsin, who had been taken into custody early Sunday morning as a person of interest, was being released without charges.
Authorities had initially detained the man, identified by law enforcement sources as Benjamin Erickson, at a hotel in Coventry, Rhode Island. Officials stated that after further investigation and corroboration of evidence, they determined the “evidence now points in a different direction,” meaning there was “no basis to believe that he’s a person of interest,” according to Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha. Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez confirmed that the manhunt for the gunman who carried out the Saturday attack remains active and ongoing.
The quick release of the detained individual confirms that the actual suspect who fled the scene, described only as a male dressed in black, is still at large, plunging the Brown community back into an anxious state just as final exams were set to be completed before the holiday break.
