The Providence mayor wants the Reddit tipster to get a $50,000 FBI reward. It might not be so simple
By Zoe Sottile, CNN
(CNN) — His detailed tip helped lead investigators to the gunman behind the deadly Brown University shooting – but whether the tipster known only as “John” will ever receive the $50,000 reward offered by the FBI is still an open question.
After two students were fatally shot and nine wounded at the Providence, Rhode Island, school December 13, the FBI announced it would offer a $50,000 reward for “information leading to the identification, arrest, and conviction of the individual responsible.”
One crucial tip, which first appeared as a comment on Reddit with details about the suspect’s vehicle, provided vital information for investigators as they hunted the man they say opened fire at Brown’s engineering building before gunning down a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor at his home days later. The Reddit comment helped officers narrow in on the suspect’s rental vehicle, which they traced to a Salem, New Hampshire, storage facility where he was found dead.
For Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, the tip – which was cited in an affidavit and arrest warrant for the shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente – was so important that the tipster deserves all of the $50,000. He argued as much in a letter addressed to FBI Director Kash Patel.
“John is no less than a hero,” Smiley said in the letter, which his office shared with CNN. “His bravery, selflessness and stewardship on behalf of his community went far beyond what anyone could ever hope from a tip.”
There’s just one hiccup: Because Valente, a Portuguese national who briefly studied at Brown’s physics department more than 20 years ago but never completed his degree, was found dead, there will never be an arrest and conviction, which the FBI specified in offering the reward.
It’s unclear how the FBI might respond to the mayor’s request. A spokesperson for the bureau told CNN “the FBI will not comment on whether reward money has been paid and to whom” for “privacy protection, and to ensure the public’s continued cooperation and incentivization with any future assistance.”
Smiley was resolute in his letter. “I believe that our community is breathing easier today because of the extraordinary assistance John provided to our law enforcement agencies,” he wrote. “I am writing to you today to request that the entirety of the $50,000 reward be issued to this incredible Providence neighbor.”
Reddit post provided key details about suspect’s vehicle
John’s comment on Reddit was one of countless made in communities dedicated to Providence and true crime generally, as users discussed the extended manhunt and the baffling set of crimes that disturbed the close-knit academic communities at Brown and MIT.
But John wasn’t just speculating about the shooting. He said he had seen the suspect, who was shown in photos and videos from authorities, opening and backing away from a gray Nissan parked near the gates of the Rhode Island Historical Society.
“I’m being dead serious,” the post, quoted in the affidavit for Valente’s arrest, reads. “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. That was the car he was driving.”
A tip about the Reddit post led police to identify a “grey/blue Nissan sedan” in surveillance videos.
He ‘blew this case wide open’
John’s help went beyond just the Reddit post.
Four days after the shooting at Brown’s engineering building, police released photos of the suspect interacting with an unknown person, and they urged that person to come forward with any information about the suspect.
That evening, a man approached Providence police officers on Brown’s campus. He was the man featured in the photos, he told them, and he was the Reddit poster.
John – whose full identity is known to police, according to the affidavit – accompanied police to the station for an interview. He described his encounters with the suspect, whom he said he saw inside the Barus and Holley engineering building the day of the shooting, and helped identify surveillance images of the suspect and his vehicle.
While giving his statement to police, officers showed the tipster more images of the car they were seeking.
“Holy sh*t, that might be it,” John told them, the affidavit says.
“It was really a critical turning point, and this was an individual who stepped up and stepped forward for all the right reasons,” Smiley told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on Friday, “probably with legitimate fear for what that might mean for his safety, but he did it for all the right reasons.”
John “blew this case right open,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said at a Thursday night news conference. “He blew it open.”
Car led police to Valente
The rental car’s original license plate, seen on surveillance video, helped police trace its origin to an Alamo Rent a Car in downtown Boston, according to the Providence Police affidavit.
The company told them the renter’s name: Claudio Manuel Neves Valente.
But officials did not initially release that name, Neronha later said, because they hoped to catch up to Valente when he returned the car.
“We wanted to try to take him without him knowing we were coming,” the attorney general said.
Valente never returned the vehicle, but investigators found the Nissan Sentra abandoned near the New Hampshire storage building where he’d rented a unit in November, and where investigators say he’d been spotted wearing the same clothes the suspect wore after the killing of esteemed MIT professor Nuno Loureiro. The two men attended the same academic program in Portugal from 1995 to 2000.
On December 18, five days after the Brown shooting, officers swarmed the facility and found Neves Valente dead inside an unoccupied unit next to the one he had rented. He had killed himself, said Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez Jr. He is believed to have died December 16.
The discovery brought an end to a winding, multistate manhunt that saw one person briefly detained before being released and cleared. Still, much about the shooting and Valente remains unclear. Why did he target the university, where he’d spent only a few months more than 20 years ago, and the professor? How did he spend the decades since withdrawing from Brown? And why did he take his own life?
Past rewards
Another unanswered question: whether John, or someone else, will receive any of the $50,000 reward money.
There has been at least one case when authorities distributed tip money even when a suspect was found dead.
After former Los Angeles police officer Christopher Dorner, who had an anti-police vendetta and killed four people, was found dead in a vacant mountain cabin after a shootout with police, around a dozen parties claimed they had provided the key tip that led authorities to the suspect, according to The Associated Press. Eventually, a panel of judges decided most of the $1 million reward money would go to a couple whom he held at gunpoint and tied up in their Southern California cabin before stealing their vehicle to escape. One of the two, Karen Reynolds, called police, identifying Dorner and giving the location of their cabin and a description of the vehicle.
In other high-profile cases, it’s unclear whether anyone has ever received the reward money.
Authorities said last year they were still determining who would get some of the $60,000 in rewards offered by the FBI and Crime Stoppers for the capture of the person who shot and killed UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York, according to the AP.
Some 400 people submitted tips during the five-day search, and around 30 of them proved helpful for the New York Police Department in tracking the shooter’s movements before and after the killing, the NYPD told the AP.
In the end, it was a 911 call from a McDonald’s employee in Altoona, Pennsylvania, that led police to find and arrest Luigi Mangione, who has pleaded not guilty to all federal charges against him.
The FBI reward requires a conviction, so the tipster likely isn’t yet eligible for that money. But the Police Foundation board has said the 911 caller is eligible for the $3,500 Crime Stoppers portion, which could go to that caller or be divided among a number of tipsters, according to the AP.
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