An amateur detective was the one who helped police in the huge manhunt for the Browns University shooter in Rhode Island – as he posted a tip off on Reddit of his encounter with the man
A social media sleuth helped police track down the main suspect in the Brown University shooting – and it’s all thanks to Reddit. The tip off came from an anonymous Reddit user, who was only known by the psydonym ‘John’, who police sya helped them “blow the case right open”.
Claudio Neves Valente – a Portuguese national who had previously studied at the university in Providence, Rhode Island was found dead on Thursday (18 December) after an intensive manhunt. The 48-year-old was discovered with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, which is roughly 80 miles north of the city where the Ivy League school is located.
After officials had released videos and images of a man of interest, that were taken just a few hours before the deadly shooting that killed two people and injured nine others, ‘John’ said he recognised the approximately 5ft 8ins male ‘with a stocky build’ who the FBI were hunting for.
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John wrote: “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. It was parked in front of the little shack behind the Rhode Island Historical Society on the Cooke St side. I know because he used his key fob to open the car, approached it and then something prompted him to back away.
“When he backed away he relocked the car. I found that odd, so when he circled the block, I approached the car and that is when I saw the Florida plates. He was parked in the section between the gate of the RIHS and the corner of Cooke and George St.”
Police then reviewed the CCTV footage and discovered the grey Nissan with Florida license plates, which John had flagged as being suspicious, according to Sky News. The investigators then used surveillance cameras to track the vehicle’s journey, which saw the car head to a Boston suburb before later venturing on to the storage facility in Salem.
Valente had changed the plates on his car in a bid to cover his tracks, officials said. John later told police that he first encountered the masked man inside the bathroom facilities of the Barus and Holley building – where the shooting took place – at around 1.45pm on the day of the incident.
‘John’ then explained how he felt “alarmed” when he noticed the man’s clothing which was “inappropriate and inadequate for the weather”. He then began to follow the alleged shooter around the area – before making note of his parking spot and inspecting the contents of his vehicle.
He noticed ‘two fanny style bags on the rear floorboard on the passenger side’ and continued to follow the suspect, who eventually accused John of ‘harassing’ him’.
Rhode Island’s attorney general Peter Neronha said at a press conference on Thursday: “We had that picture of that second individual, and within an hour, no more than two, that person came forward to two Providence police officers. He blew this case right open. When you crack it, you crack it.
“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.” Then just two hours after their encounter, the shooting took place on the University campus.