Key Highlights
- Sweeping surveillance, now found in doorbells, cars and a vast network of vehicle-tracking cameras, did eventually help track down the whereabouts of Claudio Neves Valente, the 48-year-old former Brown graduate student investigators believe was responsible for the Dec.
- 13 shooting and another killing two days later of an MIT professor in Brookline, Massachusetts. But the latest artificial intelligence-powered surveillance was of little use in the early search for a gunman who walked away from the Brown campus after the shooting and slipped unnoticed into the surrounding neighborhoods of Providence, Rhode Island.
- He evaded detection for days, using a hard-to-trace phone, avoiding facial recognition software by obscuring his face with a medical-type mask and switching the license plates on his rental cars. It wasn't until a local Reddit user "blew this case right open” with an old-fashioned tip first posted on the social media platform that police were able to connect a car to Neves Valente, said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha.
- They finally found the suspect dead Thursday in Salem, New Hampshire, days after he likely killed himself. The Reddit tipster known only as John is “no less than a hero,” Providence Mayor Brett Smiley wrote Friday to FBI Director Kash Patel, asking for the entirety of the FBI's $50,000 award for information leading investigators to the suspect. Strangers have invited him to Christmas dinner and suggested he get a “key to the city and free coffee and doughnuts for life,” according to fellow contributors to Reddit's Providence forum. It was a stark turn from 2013 when commentators on Reddit and other online discussion boards falsely smeared a Brown University student as a potential suspect in the deadly attack at Boston's famed marathon, just an hour's north of Providence, because of a supposed resemblance to a grainy suspect image.
- “Hey Reddit, enough Boston bombing vigilantism,” declared a headline in The Atlantic at the time.“It definitely went sideways in the Boston Marathon situation,” said Liza Potts, a professor at Michigan State University and director of a digital humanities lab that studied the online response.
