Brown University has placed its troubled police chief on administrative leave “effective immediately” in the wake of the devastating campus shooting that killed two students.
Rodney Chatman, the Ivy League school’s vice president for public safety and emergency management who has been criticized for Brown’s lax security following the shooting, “will be on administrative leave, effective immediately” while a review into campus is safety is underway, the university announced Monday.
Hugh T. Clements, the former chief of police of the Providence Police Department, was named as Chatman’s temporary replacement, according to the statement.
Chatman’s four-year tenure with the university has been plagued with varied career-ending allegations, with one departing officer telling the Brown Daily Herald in January 2025 that the contested chief was “vindictive,” and ran a “toxic,” “s—tshow” department.
He previously held the same position at the University of Utah – for just one year.
Chatman’s department along with local and federal law enforcement partners were unable to identify a suspect in the school shooting until a Reddit post helped break the case days later.
Claudio Neves Valente, the deranged man who gunned down two underclassmen during a finals review session on Dec. 13, handily evaded campus security as he fled campus just minutes after the earliest reports of the shooting.
He was found dead in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire nearly a week after the shooting. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Authorities said that Valente also shot and killed MIT Professor Nuno Loureiro at his home in Cambridge, Mass. on Dec. 15.
This is a breaking story. Please check back for updates.
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