Reddit post led to breakthrough in Brown shooting investigation

PROVIDENCE, Rhode Island - Three days after the deadly shooting at Brown University, officers received an anonymous tip that stuck out from a flood of information. It directed the authorities to a post on Reddit.

“I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental,” the Reddit user posted, according to an affidavit filed by the police in Providence, Rhode Island.

That tip would later lead to a breakthrough in the search for not only the campus attacker,
but also the suspect in the killing of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

It also ended the days-long search that had put both the Brown and MIT communities on edge.

A day after the Reddit post was made, the writer approached law enforcement officials and told them about his encounter with a suspicious man at Brown University’s Barus and Holley building.

The information “blew this case right open”, Attorney-General Peter Neronha of Rhode Island said in a news conference on Dec 18.

The tipster, whom police referred to only as John, said he had encountered the suspect inside a bathroom on the ground floor of the building between 1.45pm and 2pm on Dec 13, around two hours before the first shots were reported.

John said the suspect’s clothing was inappropriate for the weather and that they had made eye contact.

John told the police that he followed the man after he left the building to a Nissan vehicle with a Florida plate. But instead of entering the vehicle, the suspect started walking around the block, with John behind him. John said it was like “a game of cat and mouse”.

At one point, the two men spoke.

According to the affidavit, John asked the suspect: “Your car is back there, why are you circling the block?”, to which the suspect responded, “Why are you harassing me?” John went on his own way soon after that.

When the police showed John images of the suspect’s car from safety cameras, he said: “That might be it.”

It was the breakthrough the authorities had been looking for.

The suspect’s vehicle was a key detail in the investigation. A Brown University faculty member had also described a suspicious vehicle in the same neighbourhood – a grey sedan with Florida plates.

It did not take long for investigators to find that the car was rented from Alamo Rent a Car in downtown Boston. And from the rental agreement, they got a name: Claudio Neves Valente.

Then came more information about the suspect: He was a Portuguese national.

Brown University said he was a former student, enrolled from the autumn of 2000 through the 2001 spring semester. He was there for a doctorate in physics, but withdrew from that programme in 2003.

Travel records showed that years later, in 2017, Valente returned to the United States as a legal permanent resident.

At this point, the investigations into the Brown University shooting and the killing three days later of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro
appeared to converge.

Through surveillance footage, investigators tracked the grey Nissan to near Prof Loureiro’s home. They also determined that the suspect drove that car to a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, where they found the body of Valente, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, on the night of Dec 18.

The investigators now also knew that Valente had rented hotel rooms in Boston, as well as that storage unit. And according to Ms Leah Foley, the US attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Valente and Prof Loureiro had attended the same academic programme in Portugal from 1995 to 2000.

At some point after the shooting at Brown, the plates on the suspect’s car were changed from Florida to Maine, Ms Foley added.

The suspect’s motives in both attacks remain under investigation.

“I think there’s a lot of unknowns,” said Attorney-General Neronha of Rhode Island. “In terms of why Brown? I think that’s a mystery.” NYTIMES