Investigators struggled to identify suspect while Brown University gunman went on to kill again, timeline shows

By the time it finally ended, five full days after the shooting, the manhunt for the Brown University gunman surpassed the four-day search for the Boston Marathon bombers and was on par with the five-day pursuit of Luigi Mangione in the UnitedHealthcare CEO shooting case.

In the days the gunman was on the run, investigators say he went on to shoot and kill prominent MIT professor Nuno Loureiro at his home in the Boston area. 

The suspect, identified as former Brown grad student Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, was found dead by suicide in a New Hampshire storage unit Thursday night, police said.  

The manhunt was complicated by the early misidentification of a person of interest and limited, low-quality video footage. 

A timeline of the events shows a few key points where the investigation struggled — until a Reddit tipster provided crucial information that police say led them to the shooter. 

Early misidentification of a person of interest  

The morning after the shooting, FBI Director Kash Patel announced on X that authorities had detained a person of interest overnight. Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said in a news briefing that the city could "breathe a little easier." 

But later in the day, officials released the person after determining that he had no involvement in the shooting.

Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said that some evidence had "pointed to" the initial person of interest, but that the investigation now "points in a different direction." Providence Police Chief Colonel Oscar L. Perez Jr. said the detention was "not a mistake" but "just how investigations work." 

Multiple law enforcement sources told CBS News on Monday that the investigation had fully moved away from that person, and that investigators "had to effectively restart after early missteps" set the process "back by several hours." Officials acknowledged that the case was behind, especially as leads typically narrow after an early window. 

Patel and the FBI have faced scrutiny before for their use of social media in high-profile cases, notably after Charlie Kirk's assassination, when Patel posted on X that a suspect was in custody, then backtracked two hours later.

Poor images slowed identification 

Authorities later shared footage of a second person of interest who they believed was the shooter. But the images released to the public — even an "enhanced" video — were blurry and did not clearly show the person's face. The man was dressed in dark clothing and wearing a hat and face covering. 

Officials have said part of the Brown University building where the shooting occurred lacked cameras, citing its age. 

"There are fewer, if any, cameras in that location, I imagine because it's an older building," Rhode Island Governor Dan McKee said in a news briefing.

Brown University said in a statement that the campus has "an expansive network of security cameras," more than 1,200 in all, but acknowledged that cameras "do not extend to every hallway, classroom, laboratory and office across the 250+ buildings on campus." 

Video obtained from the neighborhood shows the second person of interest walking along a few streets near campus about two hours before the shooting, but his trail was lost after leaving the crime scene. 

Investigators re-canvassed the area around the campus on Monday, according to multiple law enforcement sources, and collected CCTV footage from homes and local businesses to attempt to reconstruct the suspect's movements and identify vehicles or escape routes that may have been used. 

However, it wasn't until a Reddit user posted comments about his encounters with the man, and shared information about the car he was driving, that law enforcement was able to pick up the trail and identify who they were looking for. They said they received the information from the Reddit tipster, known as "John," on Tuesday, Dec. 16.

By that time, another killing had already taken place.

Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez acknowledged the department was under a lot of pressure to solve the case.

"There was a lot of criticism, too, as far as, like, how long has the investigation taken," Perez told CBS News in an interview Friday. "And sometimes, you know, it's just that when you're not a police officer, you don't understand how this works," he said, explaining that investigators have to evaluate all the leads and physical evidence, which can be a painstaking process. 

"And so it takes work and … you can't do that within minutes. Sometimes it takes days," Perez said.  

Connecting the dots with a suspect on the run

An FBI special agent said in charging documents that there is probable cause to believe the same gunman who committed the mass shooting at Brown on Saturday, Dec. 13, then traveled from Rhode Island to Massachusetts to murder Lourerio, who was shot at his home on Monday, Dec. 15. 

Following the Reddit user's tip, investigators determined that a gray Nissan Sentra rental car was captured on license-plate readers near Brown University from Dec. 1 to Dec. 12. 

When police showed the tipster, "John," two of those vehicle photos, known as Flock images, he said, "Holy s---. That might be it."

CCTV images from the day before the shooting also captured an individual in the area of Brown University "consistent with images" of the suspect that were taken from surveillance video at the agency in Boston where he rented the car. Rental car records confirmed the suspect's identity, police said.

At some point after the shooting, the suspect left Providence and drove back to Boston. The charging documents say Google email and voice accounts associated with the shooter were logged onto from IP addresses near Boston University on Sunday, Dec. 14. 

At that point, police still didn't know who they were looking for in the shooting that killed two students, sophomore Ella Cook and freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, and wounded nine others.

Then on the evening of Monday, Dec. 15, Lourerio was shot at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. He died the next day. 

The professor's home is about a half mile from the area where the suspect logged into his Google accounts the day before. Police say surveillance footage also captured images of a vehicle matching the description of the suspect's rental car leaving the area after Lourerio was shot, and Foley said, "there's video of him entering that apartment building" that night.

While the motive is still shrouded in mystery, investigators believe the suspect and the MIT professor had crossed paths before. Both studied physics at the same university program in their native Portugal in the late 1990s.

"My understanding is that they did know each other," said Leah Foley, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts.

The tip from "John" about the suspicious man and his car in Providence came in to police the day after Loureiro's shooting, and the investigation accelerated.

"He blew this case right open," Neronha said.

Sources told CBS News that once they had the name of the suspect, they found the storage unit he'd rented in New Hampshire and knew to search there. 

That's where they found his body Thursday night — two days after he had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, an autopsy revealed.