How a Reddit post blew open the Brown University shooting case

The man authorities believe committed the deadly shooting at Brown University was found dead inside a Salem, New Hampshire, storage unit, authorities said Thursday night.

Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown graduate student and Portuguese national, was also believed to have killed a renowned physics professor this week near Boston.

Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez said the suspect, whose last known address was in Miami, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound and acted alone, “as far as we know.”

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The five-day investigation got its breakthrough after investigators received an anonymous tip on Dec. 16 about a Reddit post that suggested police look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates spotted around Brown’s campus.

With that information, along with other witness accounts and corroborating evidence, police were later able to confirm that the vehicle, a rental from a Boston-based Alamo, belonged to the suspect, according to an affidavit filed by the Providence Police Department.

The Reddit post that led to a break in the Brown University shooting case, cited in the Providence Police Department’s affidavit.

That post’s information “blew this case wide open,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said at a late Thursday news conference.

Police said Neves Valente killed two students and wounded nine others Dec. 13 at Brown before escaping campus. On Dec. 15, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a 47-year-old physics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was killed at his home outside Boston and died the following day in the hospital.

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The FBI initially said there was no known link between the cases. But investigators said Neves Valente is responsible for both instances of gun violence. Police believe he attended the same Portuguese university as Loureiro, the slain professor, between 1995 and 2000.

In a separate news conference later Thursday night, Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said rental car and hotel records connected Neves Valente to both shootings. The same car was also seen in the neighborhoods around the Brown campus before the shooting.

“We got ‘em,” Ted Docks, the special agent in charge of the FBI in Boston, said Thursday night in Providence. “Even though the suspect was found dead tonight, our work is not done. There are many questions that need to be answered.”

Here’s the latest on how the investigation has unfolded.

What was the break in the case?

Investigators look at a grey Nissan car at a storage facility, where the Brown University shooter, identified by authorities as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, took his own life, in Salem, New Hampshire. Photo by CJ Gunther/Reuters

For days, authorities faced mounting scrutiny for the lack of any major breaks in the Brown shooting case.

As each day passed with limited new information to share with the public about the shooter, police urged Providence community members to search for and share any potential images of or interactions with the gunman. Security images from the neighborhood, some blurry and some enhanced, showed a masked man in dark clothing walking near the site of the shooting at various times.

On Wednesday, police released photos of a second individual, saying the unknown person was “in proximity to the person of interest.”

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said this man, identified as “John” in the affidavit, came forward within an hour of the images being released.

John, who identified himself as the Reddit poster to police, had observed the suspect several times before the Brown shooting.

He first encountered the suspect in a ground-floor bathroom of the Barus and Holley building about two hours before shots rang out in the classroom. John described the suspect’s clothing as “inappropriate and inadequate for the weather,” the affidavit said, adding that he had locked eyes with the suspect.

The person of interest in connection with the Dec. 13 shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, in a screengrab from video released by the Providence Police. Photo provided by Providence Police via Reuters

After the suspect left the building, John said he was then engaged in “a game of cat and mouse” with the man. John told police he followed the suspect to a Nissan with a Florida plate, but he didn’t go into the car and instead walked around the block. The suspect would switch directions “every time they saw each other,” the affidavit said.

The two ended up exchanging words.

“Your car is back there, why are you circling the block?” John recalled he asked the suspect, according to the affidavit.

“Why are you harassing me?” the suspect repeatedly said.

A custodian interviewed by police earlier in the week also said he encountered a suspicious person that matched the description of the suspected shooter. He recalled the dates Nov. 28 and Dec. 1, according to the affidavit. In one instance, the custodian, like John, said he observed this person in a ground-level bathroom of the building where the shooting occurred.

How did the suspect end up in New Hampshire?

Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, suspect in the Brown University shooting in Providence, Rhode Island, is seen picking up a vehicle at an Alamo in Boston in this frame grab from CCTV released in an affidavit by the Providence Police. Image provided by Providence police via Reuters

After the suspect fled Rhode Island for Massachusetts, authorities believe he replaced the license plate on his rental car with a Maine plate to cover his tracks.

Foley said security footage captured Neves Valente entering an apartment building near Loureiro’s residence in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Dec. 15 — the same day the professor was shot. The suspect was then seen about an hour later entering the storage facility across the border in Salem, Foley added, where Neves Valente’s body was ultimately found.

Neronha said there are several lingering questions around the suspect’s motives: Why now? Why Brown? Why these students? Why this classroom?

“That is really unknown to us,” he said.

What new details did investigators learn about the suspect’s connection to Brown?

The Barus and Holley engineering building following the shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, on Dec. 17. Photo by Taylor Coester/ Reuters

The shooting happened shortly after 4 p.m. EST on Saturday, Dec. 13, inside a first-floor classroom at the Barus and Holley building, which houses Brown’s engineering and physics departments. Students at the Ivy League school had been preparing for and taking final exams ahead of the upcoming winter break.

Brown University President Christina Paxson said at Thursday’s news conference that Neves Valente enrolled at Brown as a graduate student from fall 2000 to spring 2001 to study physics. He attended for three semesters before taking leave in 2001 and then later withdrawing in 2003.

Paxson added that Neves Valente wasn’t a current student and did not receive a degree from Brown.

Foley said Neves Valente studied at Brown on an F1 visa.

The Brown president also said that during his time as a student, Neves Valente was only enrolled in physics classes. It was “safe to assume,” Paxson added, that Neves Valente would have spent “a great deal of time” in the Barus and Holley building, where the shooting took place.

“Tonight, our Providence neighbors can breathe a little easier,” said Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, who thanked residents for aiding authorities in their search in Thursday’s news conference.

The city “showed our nation what a tight- knit community looks like,” he added.

Who were the victims?

An undated photo of Nuno Loureiro, MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering and director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Photo provided by Jake Belcher via Reuters

The two people killed in the shooting were undergraduate students at Brown.

MuhammadAziz Umurzakov was a first-year student from Midlothian, Virginia, who “had big dreams of becoming a neurosurgeon,” his sister said in a GoFundMe campaign. while writing that her brother was “incredibly kind, funny, and smart.” The family members are naturalized citizens who left Uzbekistan for the United States in 2011.

Ella Cook was a sophomore from Mountain Brook, Alabama, who served as vice president of Brown’s chapter of College Republicans of America. The group released a statement Sunday to offer condolences and paid tribute to Cook’s “bold, brave, and kind heart.”

“These were two young people whose amazing promise was extinguished too soon,” Brown University President Christina H. Paxson said in a statement Tuesday. “Both were at or near the beginning of their Brown journey — actually, they were at the beginning of a lot of things.”

School officials have not released the names of the students who were injured in the attack, due to privacy concerns. All nine injured in the shooting are now in stable condition, three of whom have been discharged from the hospital, officials said Thursday.

Loureiro became a member of MIT’s faculty in 2016. As a professor in the school’s nuclear science and engineering and physics departments, he was also the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. One colleague said Loureiro “was not only a brilliant scientist, he was a brilliant person.”