It took a minute, but authorities were finally able to ID the alleged shooter in the Brown University mass shooting.
Believe it or not, the case was apparently cracked by a local homeless man who pointed police in the right direction.
And while the case now appears to be nearing closure, there have been some aftershocks directly related to this case on the immigration front.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha stated that a homeless man, only known as John, had been credited with cracking the case.
He noticed the alleged shooter on Reddit, then told police that they needed to check out a rental car with out-of-state tags.
Neronha posted to Reddit, “I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. I know because he used his key fob to open the car, approached it, and then something prompted him to back away.”
John noticed the man acting suspiciously around the car, which is what got his attention. At one point, he actually questioned the suspect about his activity, to which the man responded, “Why are you harassing me?”
Thanks to John’s tip, the suspect in the shooting was eventually identified as Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente.
Neves-Valente was in the United States via the lottery system (more on that in a second), and he had studied at Brown briefly between 2000 and 2001 before taking a leave of absence and eventually withdrawing.
Police found his dead body on Thursday. He was reportedly near a storage unit in New Hampshire that police had linked to him.
Leah B. Foley, the United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts, announced, "This evening at approximately 9 p.m., federal agents breached a storage locker in Salem, New Hampshire, in search of Claudio Neves-Valente, a Portuguese national we believed shot and killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor in Brookline, Massachusetts. Federal agents found Neves-Valente dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound."
As I noted, there has been some aftershock related to the identity of the shooter, as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced that she is going to suspend the lottery visa program.
She posted to X, "The Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country.”
Noem continued, "In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people. At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program."
Democrats and program advocates will likely say Trump's decision is egregious overkill, and there will surely be legal challenges to this order. But as far as Trump is concerned, the shooting gave him the excuse to kill a program that has been on his radar for some time.
