Police Say Reddit Post Led Them To Brown University Gunman

A Reddit post led authorities to the suspected killer of two Brown University students and an MIT professor on Thursday night.

Police in New Hampshire say that Claudio Neves Valente was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a storage facility in Salem. Authorities say Valente, whose name was publicly revealed for the first time on Thursday night, opened fire at Brown’s School of Engineering in Providence on Saturday, killing students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, while wounding nine others.

Authorities were also seeking Valente in connection with the subsequent murder of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro in Brookline, Massachusetts.

At a press conference, officials announced that Valente had taken his own life and said a Reddit post tipped them off.

A redditor posted on the Providence, Rhode Island subreddit and said they had seen a gray Nissan with Florida license plates:

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.

The same day, another redditor replied to the post stating that they had called in the post “just in case it wasn’t already done.”

At the press conference, a reporter asked that, considering the time lapse of three days between the tip and police locating Valente, if the tip had been “lost.”

“We received a tip about that post and immediately acted on it,” replied Providence police chief Oscar Perez. “And so that’s exactly what occurred. As soon as the tip came in, we had a tip center upstairs that was staffed, as I mentioned earlier, by detectives and agents. They were going through hundreds of tips that were coming in hundreds. Hundreds. We were vetting them through, ruling them out.”

Watch above via CNN.