The authorities dealing with the mass shooting at Brown University hailed on Friday a member of the public who came forward with information that helped crack the case and lead to the suspect.
A man known publicly so far only as “John” posted key information on the Reddit platform about an encounter with the suspect that caught the attention of investigators, while Reddit users urged him to go to the police with his tips.
The man approached a police officer in Providence, the Rhode Island capital where the Ivy League school is based, and said “I think you are looking for me,” according to authorities.
He is now expected to be eligible for the $50,000 reward offered by the FBI for information leading to the suspect in the Brown tragedy.
John reported an unusual encounter at the university with the person who turned out to be the suspect and said he also saw him acting oddly in relation to a rented gray Nissan car with Florida license plates.
“He was, in fact, critical to this and certainly everyone in Providence owes this individual a debt of gratitude,” Brett Smiley, the mayor of Providence, said in an interview with CNN on Friday morning.
“He came in and was fully forthcoming , provided key details … We had disparate pieces of information and we had strong suspicions that these pieces of information fit together but it hadn’t been corroborated and he was able to do that for us, and so it was really a critical turning point,” Smiley said.
The mayor added that John probably had legitimate fear for his safety after an image of him on surveillance footage was released by the authorities but “this was an individual who stepped up and stepped forward for all the right reasons.”
Smiley said that the motive of the dead suspect, Claudio Neves Valenté, was not yet known, over the shooting at Brown, where he was briefly a graduate student 25 years ago, and the killing on Thursday of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Investigators believe Valenté was also responsible for shooting dead the MIT professor Nuno FG Loureiro at his home in the Boston suburbs.
The tipster, John, was reportedly of no fixed abode and was staying in the basement of the engineering building at Brown where he first bumped into Valenté in a bathroom before the mass shooting last Saturday evening, the New York Post reported.
He later pursued Valenté and saw him with the rental car that ultimately helped investigators track him down to Salem, New Hampshire, where Valenté was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on Thursday night.
Smiley said the tipster was, himself, a Brown graduate. “He was proud of that community and he realized [when he encountered the suspect on campus] that it was someone he had never seen before”, which aroused his suspicions, Smiley said on CNN.
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