A day after a suspect in shootings connected to two New England universities was found dead, new details were emerging on Friday about the dayslong manhunt for the 48-year-old killer.
It took a Reddit post, a series of surveillance camera images and a car rental contract to find the suspect, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who had fatally shot himself inside of a storage unit in New Hampshire.
The discovery on Thursday came days after the killing of two students at Brown University last weekend and of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology earlier this week. It calmed anxiety that had mounted across the region as the killer remained on the loose.
What ultimately helped investigators find Mr. Neves Valente was a tip about a post someone had made on Reddit.
“I’m being dead serious,” the post began, according to an affidavit filed by the police in Providence, R.I. “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental.”
A day after the Reddit post was made, the writer approached law enforcement officials and told them about his encounter with a suspicious man in Brown University’s Barus and Holley building.
The information “blew this case right open,” Attorney General Peter F. Neronha of Rhode Island said at a news conference.
The tipster, whom the police referred to only as John, said that he encountered the suspect inside a bathroom on the ground floor of the building between 1:45 p.m. and 2 p.m., around two hours before the first shots were reported. John said that the suspect’s clothing was inappropriate for the weather and that they had made eye contact.
John told the police that he followed the man after he left the building to a Nissan with a Florida plate. But instead of entering the vehicle, the suspect started walking around the block, with John behind him. John said it was like “a game of cat and mouse.”
At one point, the two men spoke. According to the affidavit, John asked the suspect, “Your car is back there, why are you circling the block?” To which the suspect responded, “Why are you harassing me?” John went his own way soon after.
Mayor Brett P. Smiley of Providence told CNN that the Reddit tipster was a Brown graduate who had been pictured in a photograph released by the police. However, John wrote on Reddit on Thursday that while he had indeed provided information to the authorities, but that he is not the man in the photograph. The authorities did not explain the apparent discrepancy.
“He provided the Reddit tip initially. Anonymously,” Mr. Smiley said. “And then when we put the photo out and put the call out that we needed to talk to this person, he then turned up to a Providence police officer and was fully forthcoming. And so it’s sort of an amazing sequence of events, but really turned out to be critical to our investigation. We’re grateful to him.”
When the police showed John images of the suspect’s car from safety cameras, he said: “That might be it.”
It was the breakthrough the authorities had been looking for.
The suspect’s vehicle was a key detail in the investigation. A Brown University faculty member had also described a suspicious vehicle in the same neighborhood, a gray sedan with Florida plates. It did not take long for investigators to find that the car was from an Alamo rental location in downtown Boston.
The area where Mr. Neves Valente parked his vehicle before the shooting showed some level of preparation. The Nissan was positioned on a street corner in a residential neighborhood sheltered by vegetation. Cameras at the Rhode Island Historical Society near his vehicle covered the front and rear approaches. The houses adjacent to his parking space were obscured by bushes and trees.
Yellow caution tape still flapped outside the Barus and Holley building on Friday afternoon even though the active crime scene investigation had move to New Hampshire, where investigators looked through Mr. Neves Valente’s storage unit.
The authorities had obtained the suspect’s name by early on Thursday, but they did not release it publicly at first because his rental car was due to be returned in Boston that day, according to Mr. Neronha, the Rhode Island attorney general. The authorities were waiting for him, but he didn’t show, he said.
The authorities were able to determine several other details about the suspect after getting his name from the rental contract. He was a Portuguese national and a former student at Brown, enrolled from the fall of 2000 through the 2001 spring semester. He was there for a Ph.D. in physics, but withdrew from that program in 2003.
Travel records showed that years later, in 2017, Mr. Neves Valente returned to the United States as a legal permanent resident.
At this point, the investigations into the Brown University shooting and the murder three days later of Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a professor at M.I.T., appeared to converge.
Through surveillance footage, investigators tracked the gray Nissan to near Dr. Loureiro’s home. They also determined that the suspect drove that car to a storage unit in Salem, N.H., where they found the body of Mr. Neves Valente, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, on Thursday night.
The investigators now also knew that Mr. Neves Valente had rented hotel rooms in Boston, as well as that storage unit. And according to Leah B. Foley, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, Mr. Neves Valente and Dr. Loureiro had attended the same academic program in Portugal from 1995 to 2000.
At some point after the shooting at Brown, the plates on the suspect’s car were changed from Florida to Maine, Ms. Foley added.
The suspect’s motives in both attacks remain under investigation.
“I think there’s a lot of unknowns,” said Mr. Neronha, the attorney general of Rhode Island. “In terms of why Brown? I think that’s a mystery.”
Victor Mather contributed reporting.
Thomas Gibbons-Neff is a national correspondent for The Times, covering gun culture and policy.
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