Over ten years ago, the frantic five-day hunt for the Boston Marathon bombers highlighted a few key takeaways: advanced surveillance technology could aid in capturing suspects, but amateur online investigators, like those on Reddit, could not.
Despite days of investigators reviewing CCTV footage and making repeated public appeals—including offering a $50,000 (£37,500) reward—it wasn’t until Thursday that a significant breakthrough emerged. The recent intensive search for a suspect in a Brown University shooting—which left two students dead and nine others injured—challenged those earlier assumptions, according to a report by the Associated Press.
Extensive surveillance systems—ranging from doorbell cameras and vehicles to a broad network of traffic-tracking cameras—ultimately helped authorities locate Claudio Neves Valente, the 48-year-old former Brown graduate student suspected of the December 13 shooting and the subsequent killing of an MIT professor in Brookline, Massachusetts.
However, advanced AI-driven surveillance provided little help in the initial hunt. After the shooting, the gunman slipped away from the Brown campus and blended into nearby Providence neighbourhoods.
He stayed undetected for days by using a hard-to-trace phone, covering his face with a medical-style mask to avoid facial recognition, and swapping 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 user known only as John was praised as “no less than a hero” by Providence Mayor Brett Smiley in a Friday letter to FBI Director Kash Patel, urging that John receive the full $50,000 FBI reward for providing information that led to the suspect.
According to other members of Reddit’s Providence forum, strangers have invited John to Christmas dinner and suggested he be given “a key to the city and free coffee and doughnuts for life.”
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, AP reported.
“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, according to AP. “That’s why folks will jokingly refer to the ‘Reddit Detective Agency’ or the ‘Reddit Bureau of Investigations.’”
The incorrect link between the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers and a missing Brown student—who was later discovered dead in an apparent suicide—remains a vivid memory for many at the Ivy League school and within the 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, U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat and former state attorney general, urged social media speculators to “just shut up.”
“There is simply no need from an investigative point of view for people who have no idea what they’re talking about to offer their stupid and ill-informed views about what happened all over the internet,” Whitehouse said from Congress on Wednesday.
But Potts said some social media have been working better than others, and “of all the spaces that I study, Reddit seems to be getting it right more than not."
Harmful accusations were largely absent from Reddit's Providence forum, in part because volunteer moderators who manage Reddit's subject matter forums — known as subreddits — are largely responsible for keeping the peace.
“The Providence subreddit is very sensitive about (not) trying to go on a witch hunt or the mob mentality,” he said, speaking on condition of anonymity to avoid doxing and because of the platform's culture of anonymity, AP reported.
With a known vehicle, Providence police started looking through the footage from dozens of AI-powered cameras positioned around the city that can read license plates as well as other identifying details about a car, such as make, color, side damage or even bird droppings on the window.
The cameras, run by surveillance company Flock Safety, spotted his vehicle at least 14 times starting nearly two weeks before the shooting, according to a police affidavit. Providence police could then ask Flock-using police agencies in nearby cities and states to look for the same car, although New Hampshire — because of privacy restrictions on how long they can hold images — doesn't have any.
It was a breakthrough Flock was happy to boast about, especially as wariness remains in Providence's immigrant communities about more aggressive federal immigration enforcement. Flock says each of its customers decides when to share camera data, and the city doesn't share it with federal immigration agents. Some still want more safeguards.
Meanwhile, BBC reported that the affidavit says he encountered Neves Valente in the bathroom of the engineering building just hours before the attack at Brown. He became suspicious after noting the suspect's clothing was "inappropriate and inadequate for the weather".
"John" then followed the suspect out of the building where, according to police, he watched him "suddenly" turn around from the Nissan when he noticed he was being watched.
“Once you know what they are, you see them everywhere,” said Madalyn McGunagle, a policy associate at the ACLU of Rhode Island. "People notice because they’re distinct-looking — a solar panel on top with a little oval camera underneath.”
But unlike the residential doorbell cameras that spotted him walking around Providence, had Neves Valente walked by a Flock camera, it wouldn't have detected him, said Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley.
“It is a technical impossibility. The camera does not have an ability for a user to search for people,” Langley said in an interview Friday. “Our cameras are focused on vehicles because if you look at America, people drive. It is very hard to get anywhere on foot.”
“For the majority of our cities, they want to just know who is coming in and who is leaving,” he said.
Still, without John the tipster — whom local Redditors dubbed “Reddit Guy” — no one would have known how he left.
“Someone who is in the area and sees stuff all the time, they’re going to be better in a lot of ways than a random camera,” said the Providence subreddit's moderator. “John saw this guy going back and forth, unlocking his car and all that, and he just thought it was kind of weird.”
(With inputs from Associated Press, BBC)