Public calls are growing for the FBI to give its promised US$50,000 reward to a homeless man who provided information essential to leading authorities to the gunman they say killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor.
Authorities say they received a tip from an anonymous source on Tuesday about a Reddit post on the Providence subreddit, according to a law enforcement affidavit from the Rhode Island Attorney General’s Office.
That post eventually led investigators to a New Hampshire storage facility where they found the suspect dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. That man was identified on Thursday as Claudio Neves Valente.
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The post’s author was a homeless man, only known as John, who had been living in the basement of Brown University’s Barus and Holley engineering building where students Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook lost their lives and nine others were wounded in the December 13 shooting.
The same shooter is suspected of murdering MIT professor Nuno Loureiro at his Brookline home two days later.
Authorities, over the course of two press conferences on Thursday night, disclosed that Valente, then on a student visa, had been a physics graduate student at Brown for three semesters between 2000 and 2001, ultimately withdrew from the programme in 2003 and had no further association with the school.