CNN's Juliette Kayyem offered a harsh analysis of the investigation so far into the fatal shooting at Brown University, and she highlighted a significant break between local law enforcement and the FBI.
FBI Director Kash Patel trumped the detention of a person of interest in the case Sunday morning, only to see him let go by police after finding no evidence to continue holding him. Kayyem told "CNN News Central" the case was already a mess.
"I think it's kind to call it a manhunt right now," Kayyem said, "in the sense that manhunt generally means you know who you're looking for, if at least from what we know publicly, they really only have the back shot that we don't even know the identity, race or visuals of the face of the person they're looking for. So, as [anchor] John [Berman] was saying, you sort of have to do a regroup."
"That regroup is happening in two ways," she continued. "One is take a step back and figure out whether where they're looking is the right place to look. He had to have slept somewhere, he had to get gas if he went on I-95. The second is the regroup of what we call the sort of incident command, and you saw that last night."
"I had never seen a local jurisdiction essentially throw the FBI under the bus, not just saying we're in charge, but saying, look, that lead that led us to the person of interest who ended up not being the person of interest essentially was run by the FBI," Kayyem added. "They said so explicitly."
Local authorities have insisted there's no risk to the public despite the shooter remaining at large, but students have reported they don't feel safe on campus.
"I mean, this is the challenge and, unfortunately, the challenge of having so many mass shootings is you can't close down a community indefinitely until you say, well, we found the guy," Kayyem said, "and I actually believe the mayor made the right call. You have to sort of get people starting to think about maybe, you know, living. It's not normal, certainly, yet, but sort of getting back to openness."
"The lockdown in those immediate hours was totally appropriate, but, you know, we experienced this in Boston during the marathon. European cities have experienced this after terrorism," she added. "If you say everyone locked down until we find him, that's just not the right standard. But and so I know people are saying, well, if they don't have them, why are we out and about? It's just it's just unfortunately the nature of living with a certain amount of violence and risk in this country at all times."
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