How a Reddit Post Helped Identify the Brown Shooting Suspect — Who’s Also Accused of Killing MIT Professor By KC Baker

A telling Reddit post helped identify the suspect in the Brown University and MIT professor shootings this week, authorities said.

“He blew this case right open,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said at a press conference on Thursday, Dec. 18, about the anonymous source who posted information on Reddit that led authorities to identify the suspected shooter.

“That person led us to the car, which led us to the name, which led us to the photographs of that individual renting the car, which matched the clothing of our shooter here in Providence, that matched the satchel,” Neronha said.

The alleged shooter was identified as Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national who attended Brown University in Providence, R.I., in the early 2000s but did not graduate from the Ivy League school, officials said at the press conference.

The victims of the attack at Brown were identified as Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook.

Authorities found him dead inside a storage unit in Salem, N.H., on Thursday, Dec. 18.

Neves Valente was the subject of an intense manhunt that began on Saturday, Dec. 13, when he allegedly burst into an auditorium where students were taking part in a review for an upcoming economics final and fired more than 40 rounds, killing two and injuring nine.

Investigators do not believe Neves Valente had ties to the students who were shot and killed in an engineering building on the Brown University campus, CNN reports.

They are, however, investigating whether he had allegedly targeted MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, 47, a Portuguese national, who was shot and killed in his home in Brookline, Mass. on Monday, Dec. 15.

Loureiro, a director of the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center and one of the world’s leading experts in nuclear fusion, was working toward developing it as a source of unlimited clean energy, according to MIT.

He was pronounced dead on Tuesday morning.

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Investigators later learned that Loureiro and Neves Valente knew each other and had studied together in Lisbon, The New York Times reports.

During Thursday night’s press conference, officials revealed how the anonymous source who posted information on the social media forum Reddit led them to Neves Valente.

According to the Providence Police Department affidavit reviewed by PEOPLE, on Tuesday, Dec. 16, the tip command center received information from an anonymous source referencing a Reddit post from the Providence subreddit who said he saw the suspected shooter walking in the area at the time of the shooting.

“I’m being dead serious,” the anonymous source wrote. “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. That was the car he was driving.”

He said he saw the man lock the car with a key fob and then back away suddenly, which he described as “odd” and made him zero in on the man, according to the affidavit.

The anonymous source went on to say that he then saw the suspect circle the block. 

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On Wed., Dec. 17, the source approached Providence officers and identified himself as John, the Reddit poster, according to the affidavit.

John, whose true identity is known to law enforcement, accompanied officers to the police station where he said he would provide “all the information he had” about the suspect, according to the affidavit.

He told police that he had run into Neves Valente in the bathroom of the engineering building on Saturday, Dec, 13, hours before the mass shooting.

He said the suspect stood out to him because he was wearing clothes that were “inappropriate and inadequate for the weather” that he described as “flimsy,” the affidavit states.

After seeing Neves Valente acting strangely outside by his car, John told police he tailed him and eventually confronted him by asking, “Your car is back there, why are you circling the block?”

Neves Valente replied, “I don’t know you from nobody,” he asked him why he was harassing him,” the affidavit says.

John didn’t see Neves Valente again, until he saw images of the suspected gunman from surveillance footage that police had posted in case anyone recognized him.

During the press conference, Ted Docks, special agent in charge of FBI Boston, was asked if John would be given the $50,000 reward the FBI had offered for information about the subject.

“It would be logical to think that, absolutely, that individual would be entitled to that,” he said.