Providence, Rhode Island — More than a decade ago, the frenetic five-day search for the Boston Marathon bombers left some lessons in its wake.
The first is that increasingly widespread surveillance technology can help catch perpetrators. Another reason was that amateur online sleuths on Reddit couldn’t.
But this week’s intense search for the suspect in the Brown University shooting that killed two students and injured nine other people has turned the tables on those expectations.
Comprehensive monitoring, now found in doorbells, cars and a wide network of Vehicle tracking camerasHe eventually helped track down the whereabouts of Claudio Nieves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown University graduate student who investigators believe is responsible for the Dec. 13 shooting and another killing two days later of an MIT professor in Brookline, Massachusetts.
But the latest AI-driven surveillance was of little help in the early search for the gunman who walked away from the Brown University campus after the shooting and slipped unnoticed into surrounding neighborhoods in Providence, Rhode Island. He evaded detection for days, using a hard-to-trace phone, evading facial recognition software by obscuring his face with a medical mask and swapping the license plates of his rental cars.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neroha said it was only after a local Reddit user “immediately opened this case” through an old tip first posted on the social media platform that police were able to connect a car to Nevis Valiente. They finally found the suspect dead on Thursday in Salem, New Hampshire, days after he likely committed suicide.
The Reddit tipster known only as John is “nothing less than a hero,” Providence Mayor Brett Smiley wrote Friday to FBI Director Kash Patel, demanding the full $50,000 FBI reward for information that leads investigators to the suspect.
Strangers invited him to Christmas dinner and suggested he get “the key to the city and free coffee and cake for life,” according to fellow contributors to Reddit’s Providence forum.
It was a stark turnaround from 2013 when commenters on Reddit and other online discussion forums discredited a Brown University student as a possible suspect in the deadly attack on the famed Boston Marathon, just an hour north of Providence, because of a supposed resemblance to a suspicious grainy photo.
“Reddit, Enough of the Boston Bombing Vigilance,” declared a headline in The Atlantic at the time.
“It definitely went sideways in the Boston Marathon situation,” said Lisa Potts, a professor at Michigan State University and director of the Digital Humanities Lab who has studied the online response. “This is why people will jokingly refer to the ‘Reddit Detective Agency’ or the ‘Reddit Investigations Bureau.’
The flawed connection between the 2013 bombers and a missing Brown student — later found dead of an apparent suicide — is still remembered by many at the Ivy League school and surrounding community.
This week, Brown officials sought to quell another smear campaign circulating on X and other social media platforms that falsely linked a current Brown University student to a 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 “death threats and persistent hate speech,” the student said in a statement.
Frustrated by the prospect of information lines being clogged with nonsense, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat and former state attorney general, urged social media bulls to “shut up.”
“There is simply no need from an investigative standpoint for people who have no idea what they’re talking about to come forward with their stupid, uninformed views about what happened online,” Whitehouse of Congress said on Wednesday.
But Potts said some social media works better than others, and “of all the industries I study, Reddit seems to get it right more than others.”
Harmful accusations have been largely absent from Reddit’s Providence forum, in part because the volunteer moderators who run Reddit’s topic forums — known as subreddits — are largely responsible for keeping the peace.
The main Redditor of the Providence subreddit said in an interview that he has been on the platform for about 15 years and remembers the shock caused by the false Boston Marathon report.
“The Providence subreddit is very sensitive about (not) trying to continue the witch hunt or mob mentality,” he said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid defamation and because of the platform’s culture of anonymity.
The Associated Press also reached out to the tipster on Tuesday, a day after he wrote on Reddit urging police to look into a Nissan sedan with Florida license plates. Fellow Redditors urged him to contact the FBI, and he said he did.
He did not respond to requests for comment and later posted that he did not plan to speak with the media. When he finally met police on Wednesday — after he approached them on the street and identified himself as a Reddit mentor — his information gave new life to a stalled investigation.
Using a known vehicle, Providence police began examining footage from dozens of AI-powered cameras spread across the city that can read license plates as well as other identifying details about the vehicle, such as make, color, collateral damage or even bird droppings on the window.
Cameras, operated by surveillance company Flock Safety, spotted his car at least 14 times about two weeks before the shooting, according to a police affidavit. Providence police could then ask police agencies that use Fluke in neighboring cities and states to search for the same vehicle, although New Hampshire — because of privacy restrictions on how long they can keep images — doesn’t have any.
It was an accomplishment that Fluke was happy to brag about, especially as Providence’s immigrant communities remain wary of enforcing stricter federal immigration laws. Fluke says each of its clients decides when to share camera data, and the city does not share it with federal immigration agents. But some still want more guarantees.
“Once you know what these things are, you see them everywhere,” said Madalyn McGonagle, a policy fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union of Rhode Island. “People notice their distinctive appearance – a solar panel on top and a small oval camera on the bottom.”
But unlike the residential doorbell cameras that spotted him walking around Providence, if Nieves Valiente had been walking next to a Fluke camera, she wouldn’t have been able to spot him.
“It’s technically impossible,” Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley said in an interview Friday. “The camera doesn’t have the ability to search for people.” “Our cameras focus on vehicles because if you look at America, people drive. It’s very difficult to get anywhere on foot.”
“For the majority of our cities, they just want to know who is coming and who is leaving,” he said.
However, if it weren’t for tipster John — dubbed “Reddit Guy” by local Reddi users — no one would have known how he left.
“Someone who is in the area and sees things all the time is going to be better in many ways than a random camera,” the Providence coordinator said on the subreddit. “John saw this guy pacing back and forth, unlocking his car and all that, and he thought it was kind of weird.”