MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Authorities have announced that the suspect in the shooting at Brown University on Saturday, that killed two students and injured nine, was found dead last night.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
Yeah. The same man is also believed to have fatally shot an MIT physics professor at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Monday. And the big break in the case appears to have come via the social media site Reddit.
MARTIN: Ben Berke of member station Ocean State Media joins us now after a long day and night of reporting. Ben, thanks so much for joining us.
BEN BERKE, BYLINE: Good morning.
MARTIN: So what do we know about the suspected killer, and do we know anything about why he did this?
BERKE: The man's name's Claudio Neves Valente. He's a 48-year-old from Portugal who reentered the country in 2017. But a while back in the year 2000, he was actually attending Brown University as a graduate student. He dropped out after a year. Twenty-five years later, authorities say that he shot up a building that he likely did a lot of his graduate work in. And the MIT professor that he allegedly killed two days later was a physicist as well. Authorities say Valente went to university in Portugal with this professor, and even though they have drawn these connections, they still don't have a clear sense for his motive. They do know Valente killed himself in a storage locker before investigators even got there, most likely.
MARTIN: You know, it took five days for the authorities to catch up to him. Do we have any sense of how he avoided getting caught?
BERKE: Valente wore a winter coat and a medical mask, which made it hard to see his face on surveillance cameras. The U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, Leah Foley, said he drove a rental car and swapped the license plate while he was on the run.
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LEAH FOLEY: He was using a phone that was obfuscating ability to track it, and he was using, like, not credit cards that were tied to his name. And so he was sophisticated in hiding his tracks.
BERKE: As sophisticated as this operation might seem because of these details, authorities right now are saying that they think Valente acted alone.
MARTIN: What was the break in the case?
BERKE: It's a wild story. It seems that the break in the case happened on Reddit. There's a witness who saw Valente in a bathroom at Brown a few hours before the shooting. He found Valente suspicious, so he followed him out of the building, chased him to his car and confronted him. But then the witness walked away, and the shooting happened an hour or two later. For days, investigators didn't have a lead on how to find the shooter until this same witness posted on Reddit describing the suspect's vehicle. And that Reddit post is how investigators connected the suspect to a vehicle, which they were then able to track with a license plate reader to find him.
MARTIN: That is a wild story. So what questions are left beyond the obvious one of, like, why did he do this?
BERKE: A big question is what's the political response to this going to look like? Immediately after the news broke last night, Trump suspended the green card lottery program that allowed this alleged shooter to come to the United States in 2017. Another big question is how are people going to react to how Brown University responded to this tragedy? Trump's been blaming the university for not having enough cameras on campus, but the university defends its security protocols.
MARTIN: That is Ben Berke from member station Ocean State Media, after a long day and night of reporting. Ben, thank you so much.
BERKE: Anytime. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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