Providence, Rhode Island — Information from a tipster who had a strange encounter with another man on the sidewalk outside Brown University was key to police Identify the suspect They are believed to have killed two students at the school and two days later shot a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The source is identified only as “John” in a Providence police affidavit, and investigators have praised him as the key figure who provided law enforcement with the details needed to determine who was behind the shooting of Brown, as well as the killing of an MIT professor who was shot in his Brooklyn home on Monday.
Since a shooter fired more than 40 shots inside an engineering building in Brown, anxiety and frustration have swept through the Providence, Rhode Island, community, where police have come no closer to identifying the person.
But on the sixth day of the investigation, the case gained momentum, ending with police announcing late Thursday that they had found the suspected gunman dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Guide John was the reason.
“He opened this case immediately,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said of the information the person provided that led to the gunman being found about 24 hours later.
“When you break it, you break it,” he said.
According to police, John had met several times with 48-year-old Claudio Nieves Valente before Saturday’s attack. When police released photos of a person of interest — now known as Nieves Valiente — John began posting on the Reddit social media forum that he recognized the person and assumed police must be searching a gray Nissan “possibly rented.” Reddit users urged him to report it to the FBI, and John said he did. The police affidavit said they learned of the report on December 16, three days after the shooting and one day after the tip line was established.
At that point, the police affidavit says officials had not linked a vehicle to the possible shooter.
Those details led them to obtain more video of a Nissan Sentra sedan with Florida plates, and enabled Providence police officers to tap into a network of more than 70 street cameras operated throughout the city by surveillance company Flock Safety.
The affidavit says John gave investigators important additional details: He met Nieves Valiente in the engineering building’s bathroom just hours before the attack, where John indicated the suspect’s clothing was “inappropriate and weather inappropriate.”
John also bumped into Nieves-Valente outside, a few blocks from the building, where John saw Nieves-Valiente turn “abruptly” from the Nissan when he saw John. What ensued was a “game of cat and mouse,” according to John’s testimony — where the two would confront each other and Nieves Valiente would run away.
At one point, John says he shouted, “Your car is in the back, why are you going around the block?”
“The suspect responded, ‘I don’t know you from anyone,’ and then repeatedly asked the suspect, ‘Why are you harassing me?’” according to the affidavit.
John told police he eventually saw Nieves Valente approaching the Nissan sedan again and decided to drive away.
“Respectfully, I’ve said everything I have to say about this to the right people,” John wrote on Reddit on Wednesday evening.
As of Thursday, it is unknown whether John will receive the $50,000 reward offered by the FBI for information about Brown’s shooting.
Ted Dukes, special agent in charge of the FBI, said it was possible when asked by reporters.
“It would be reasonable to believe that this person is entitled to that,” he added.
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Associated Press writer Matt O’Brien contributed to this report.