Masion incident into resident evil 2?? Cant make sense of it

Hi, new to the forum and joined because i kinda need an answer... Ok.... Here i go  bare with me.

S.T.A.R.S went into the spencer mansion in 1996 in re1 and shit went down... They reported their findings after the incident to the RCPD (jill, chris, barry, rebecca, brad)..... But in resident evil 2 leon has no idea about a zombie outbreak and finding zombies comes as a bit of a shock to him (2 years later in 1998) forgive me if this is a noob question but i cant make sense of it. The people of raccoon city had no clue of what went on in the arklay mountains 2 years on? I hope i described what im thinking of because i am terrible at trying to explain things and again i appologise if this is something i should know from playing the games from their 1st release. Maybe i didnt pay enough attention to the story....

Edit: Sorrt i think i realised my error i checked the resident evil timeline. And found out the mansion occurred in mid 1998 and "S.T.A.R.S returned to racoon city but noone belived them" which is kind of shitty considering people died and a mansion exploded.... But nobody belived them LOL that makes sense

The double-post is strong in this one.
(But the power of spellcheck isn't.)

good answer. Very informative my friend

No one believed them in the police department, possibly due to the RPD connections with Umbrella. Because of that is why the surviving members of STARS started different actions to tackle Umbrella in a more direct way.

That is what i was after, thanks alot man! i need to play re2 again. just finished the re-release of the original and it got me back into it! just bought a few of the books too. im interested in knowing the full story. i used to love playing them just because of how good they were but never payed much attention to the story or the notes and files i picked up whilst playing as i was young and just wanted to kill some zombies lol

The story is the best part of the series. Also the novels are part of a different canon

There are some added plot points in the novels that do not exist in the games. They do still hit on all of the major plot points from the games as well. All of them are great reads.

In hopes RENEGAD3 comes back after his replay of the series, I'm just gonna mention that my first (and thus far only) touch in Zer0's story has been the Zero Hour book, which is fantastic.

Well, I guess there's also Umbrella Chronicles but that's just a recap.