Name: How a Reddit post led police to the suspected university shooter
Uploaded: 2025-12-20T03:11:38.248Z
Duration: 2 min 28 s
Description: The suspect in the Dec. 13 mass shooting on the campus of Brown University was found dead by suicide in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, authorities said. He has been identified as 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a former Brown grad student.

The suspect in the Dec. 13 mass shooting on the campus of Brown University was found dead by suicide in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, authorities said. He has been identified as 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a former Brown grad student.

Providence

Police identified Claudio Neves Valente as the suspect in shootings at Brown University and MIT, which resulted in three deaths and nine injuries. The investigation was aided by a Reddit post from a witness who provided details about the suspect's vehicle, leading authorities to Valente.

Using AI and license plate tracking technology, police traced Valente's movements across state lines. The manhunt concluded when Valente was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a New Hampshire storage unit. Authorities are still searching for a motive.

How a Reddit post led police to the suspected university shooter

Well, now that we know the identity of the Brown University shooter, one question remains unanswered. Why did he do it? And he may have taken the answer to the grave. When the police found him last night, he was dead. Tom Hanson now on how they tracked him down. The six-day manhunt ended last night in Salem, New Hampshire, inside a storage unit where the gunman, Claudio Neves Valente, was found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot. We got him. Valente, a former physics student at Brown, is accused of killing two students and wounding nine others last Saturday. He's also suspected of killing 47-year-old MIT professor Nuno Lauriero outside Boston two days later. The two men had studied physics at the same university in Portugal in the 1990s. But authorities tonight are still searching for a motive. Everyone is wondering why. Are you any closer to understanding a motive in either of these shootings? Yeah, no, definitely not something that has been confirmed at this point. Police got their first break in the case when, according to the affidavit, they were tipped off to a Reddit post written by a man they called John, who saw Valente in the hours before the shooting. The police need to look into a gray Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental, he wrote. That was the car he was driving. John thought Valente was suspicious and wrote down his license plate number. The two men also had some sort of encounter on the street. That matched what police had seen on surveillance video. So they posted this image of John in hopes he would come forward. We didn't know they were the same person until John approached a Providence police officer and came into the Providence police station to give an interview. And once we had that interview, we were on the path very quickly to identifying our suspect. Police then used AI and a company called Flock Safety to locate the car, which spotted it 14 times over the last few weeks, including at an Alamo rental car office in Boston, where surveillance picked up Valente outside. Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley said their software helped police track the car across state lines to the gunman's location at the storage unit in New Hampshire. So they could then see the individual had left the state, had entered Massachusetts, and then left Massachusetts heading into New Hampshire, which gave them that ability to kind of zero in on where to go. And tonight, the New Hampshire attorney general revealed Valente died on December 16. That is one day after he shot that MIT professor, Weijia.

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