Brown and MIT shooting suspect found dead in New Hampshire
The shooting suspect was a Portuguese national and here on a diversity visa lottery program.
A major break in the investigation to find the shooter who killed two students at Brown University and an MIT professor came from an unlikely source: a tip posted on Reddit.
Authorities announced they found the suspect, identified as 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Dec. 18, five days after he allegedly opened fire on students in a study session during finals season.
For days, little was known about the suspect or where he was, and the only available images of him were from surveillance cameras from homes or businesses near the university. By Dec. 17, Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez said he “could be anywhere.”
According to an arrest affidavit, an anonymous tipster pointed investigators to the online forum post on the Providence subreddit:
“I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. That was the car he was driving.”
The post went on to describe an encounter the Reddit user claimed to have had with the person whose images were circulating from authorities. It would tie the investigation together. Here’s how:
The Reddit poster described seeing the person approach the car and appear to unlock it with a key fob, then “something prompted him to back away” and he relocked it.
“I found that odd,” the post said. The poster took note of the Florida plate, and said the car was parked behind the Rhode Island Historical Society.
Based on the tip, investigators reviewed additional footage and located the Nissan sedan, and reviewed footage of an interaction between a person who would later be identified only as “John” and the suspect, which seemed to match the Reddit description, according to the affidavit.
Officials then released images of John to the public in the hopes of interviewing him further, the affidavit said.
On Dec. 17, John approached police officers and agreed to be interviewed. John told investigators he first saw the suspect on Dec. 13 in a bathroom of the Barus and Holley building, where the shooting would take place later that day. It struck John that the suspect was wearing clothes that seemed inadequate for the weather. They were “locking eyes” at one point, John said, according to the affidavit. When the suspect left, John followed him outside.
He told officers that during his encounter with the suspect near the Rhode Island Historical Society, the suspect walked away from the car, then looped back but switched directions every time the suspect saw John.
“John described this pattern as ‘a game of cat and mouse’ between himself and the Suspect,” the affidavit reads.
At one point, the two encountered each other and the suspect “ran in the opposite direction.” John followed, and approached the suspect. John asked him, “Your car is back there, why are you circling the block?” the affidavit said.
The suspect replied, “I don’t know you from nobody” and repeatedly asked “Why are you harassing me?” John told the investigators, according to the affidavit.
John said he recognized the person he interacted with as the same person from images released by police. When officers showed John surveillance images of the suspect’s vehicle, John said, “That might be it,” the affidavit said.
A Brown faculty member also reported seeing the vehicle driving unusually slow on the morning of Dec. 11. Cameras in the vicinity showed the Nissan with the Florida plate in the area 14 different times, starting on the evening of Dec. 1.
Police were able to connect the car to a vehicle rented in downtown Boston on Dec. 1 by a driver who presented a Florida license with the name Claudio Manuel Neves Valente.
Once the car and Neves Valente were identified, authorities were able to link it to the shooting death of Nuno F.G. Loureiro, the 47-year-old MIT professor, and to hotels the suspect had rented, Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Leah Foley said.
“(John) blew this case right open. He blew it open. And that’s how these cases sometimes go. You can feel like you’re not making a lot of progress…” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said. “You’re going to pull at a lot of threads and it’s not always the first one that’s going to get you where you need to go. But when you do crack it, you crack it.”
Contributing: Nick Penzenstadler, Dinah Voyles Pulver and Thao Nguyen
