With the suspect now dead in the mass shooting at Brown University and the killing of an MIT professor in Brookline, I want to call your attention to a very strange aspect of the investigation: the role of a witness who posted what he knew on Reddit before finally going to the police. The Boston Globe reports (sub. req.):
On Wednesday, officials released several images of someone they said was “in proximity of the person of interest” in the shooting. They had previously released photos and video surveillance of the person of interest himself, though none that included a clear image of his face. Video showed the two appearing to approach each other near the corner of Cooke and Benevolent streets, before the suspect turned around and veered the other way.
In an arrest affidavit released Thursday night, officials identified the witness as a man they identified only as John. They said he later led investigators to the car. When they released his photos, investigators didn’t realize John had already posted on Reddit saying police should look into a man with a grey Nissan with Florida plates, who was acting suspiciously, the affidavit said.
The New York Times has an entire story devoted to the Reddit angle, and the emphasis is slightly different. Whereas the Globe makes it sound like investigators were led to John after they saw photos of him, the Times reports that John contacted police on his own — but not until the day after he had posted what he knew on Reddit:
“I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental,” the Reddit user posted, according to an affidavit filed by the police in Providence, R.I.
That tip would later lead to a breakthrough in not only the search for the campus attacker but also the suspect in the murder of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also ended the dayslong manhunt that had put both the Brown and M.I.T. communities on edge.
A day after the Reddit post was made, the writer approached law enforcement officials and told them about his encounter with a suspicious man in Brown University’s Barus and Holley building.
The information “blew this case right open,” Attorney General Peter F. Neronha of Rhode Island said in a news conference Thursday.
I don’t want to call John irresponsible, because he did come forward and provide information that proved vital to solving the case. But this is the way too many of us think these days. Rather than immediately alerting law enforcement about what he’d seen, he posted to social media. Perhaps he was assuming that the police should already know what he knew — oblivious to the reality that law enforcement in such a situation depends on tips from members of the public.
Moreover, by posting what he’d seen on Reddit, John might have harmed the investigation by tipping off the suspect, identified by authorities as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who had once attended Brown and who may have known MIT Professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro when they took classes together in Portugal.
Law enforcement seems confident that Neves Valente, who died by suicide in Salem, New Hampshire, was the shooter. His victims were Professor Loureiro and Brown students MuhammadAziz Umurzakov and Ella Cook. The focus should now be on them and their families and friends.
Correction: I initially reported that the suspect’s body was found in Portsmouth, New Hampshire.