PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — More than a decade ago, a frenzied 5-day search for the Boston Marathon bombers left some lessons in its aftermath.
One was that increasingly pervasive surveillance technology could help catch the culprits. Another was that amateur online sleuths on Reddit could not.
But the intense search this week for a suspect in a Brown University shooting that killed two students and wounded nine other people turned the tables on those expectations.
Sweeping surveillance, now found in doorbells, cars and a vast network of vehicle-tracking cameras, did eventually help track down the whereabouts of Claudio Neves Valente, the 48-year-old former Brown graduate student investigators believe was responsible for the Dec. 13 shooting and another killing two days later of an MIT professor in Brookline, Massachusetts.
But the latest artificial intelligence-powered surveillance was of little use in the early search for a gunman who walked away from the Brown campus after the shooting and slipped unnoticed into the surrounding neighborhoods of Providence, Rhode Island. He evaded detection for days, using a hard-to-trace phone, avoiding facial recognition software by obscuring his face with a medical-type mask and switching the license plates on his rental cars.
It wasn’t until a local Reddit user “blew this case right open” with an old-fashioned tip first posted on the social media platform that police were able to connect a car to Neves Valente, said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha. They finally found the suspect dead Thursday in Salem, New Hampshire, days after he likely killed himself.
The Reddit tipster known only as John is “no less than a hero,” Providence Mayor Brett Smiley wrote Friday to FBI Director Kash Patel, asking for John to get the entirety of the FBI’s $50,000 reward for information leading investigators to the suspect.
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Strangers have invited him to Christmas dinner and suggested he get a “key to the city and free coffee and doughnuts for life,” according to fellow contributors to Reddit’s Providence forum.
It was a stark turn from 2013 when commentators on Reddit and other online discussion boards falsely smeared a Brown University student as a potential suspect in the deadly attack at Boston’s famed marathon, just an hour north of Providence, because of a supposed resemblance to a grainy suspect image.
“Hey Reddit, enough Boston bombing vigilantism,” declared a headline in The Atlantic at the time.
“It definitely went sideways in the Boston Marathon situation,” said Liza Potts, a professor at Michigan State University and director of a digital humanities lab that studied the online response. “That’s why folks will jokingly refer to the ‘Reddit Detective Agency’ or the ‘Reddit Bureau of Investigations.’”
The mistaken connection between the 2013 bombers and a missing Brown student — who was later found dead of an apparent suicide — is still remembered by many at the Ivy League school and its surrounding community.
Brown officials this week sought to swiftly tamp down another smear campaign circulating on X and other social media platforms falsely tying a current Brown student to the campus shooting because of his ethnicity, perceived political views and supposed resemblance to a police video of a person of interest. The “unimaginable nightmare” of false accusations led to “non-stop death threats and hate speech,” the student said in a statement.
Frustrated that tip lines could be jammed with nonsense,