The homeless man who cracked the Brown University shooter case is no longer living on the streets and ‘being taken care of’ by the feds, it has emerged.
The vagrant tipster, known under the pseudonym John, was sleeping in the basement of a campus building when he helped police find gunman Claudio Neves Valente after a botched five-day manhunt.
Federal officials are housing John in a hotel and making sure he is provided meals, a source told the New York Post.
The insider added that John could possibly receive the $50,000 award that the FBI had offered for information that led to a break in the case.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley has also urged the agency’s director Kash Patel to give John the award for his work to help solve the crime.
‘John is no less than a hero,’ Smiley wrote in a letter to Patel. ‘His bravery, selflessness and stewardship on behalf of his community went far beyond what anyone could ever hope from a tip.’
John’s encounter with the shooting suspect went viral when he shared details on Reddit.
Now, strangers have invited John to Christmas dinner and suggested he get a ‘key to the city and free coffee and doughnuts for life,’ according to fellow contributors to Reddit’s Providence forum.
The homeless man who cracked the Brown University shooter case, known under the pseudonym John, (pictured) is no longer living on the streets and ‘being taken care of’ by the feds, a source has claimed
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, (pictured) a former Brown University student and Portuguese national, was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Police believe he is responsible for the Brown shooting and murder of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro
Brown University students Ella Cook (left) and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov (right) were killed in the mass shooting last weekend
John’s tip is also credited with helping police identify Neves Valente as the person responsible for gunning down Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro.
The mayor’s office highlighted how authorities received hundreds of tips pertaining to the case but ‘John’s was far and above the one that helped the most.’
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha told the press last week that John ‘blew this case right open.’
John, who previously attended Brown University, had been regularly sleeping in the basement of the Barus and Holley building on campus.
He encountered the gunman in the bathroom of Brown’s engineering building just hours before the deadly attack, according to the police affidavit.
He also noticed Neves Valente’s clothing was ‘inappropriate and inadequate for the weather.’
John later bumped into the shooter outside, mere blocks from the building. He ‘suddenly’ turned around from the Nissan when he saw John, the tipster said.
The two then faced off in a ‘game of cat and mouse,’ according to John’s testimony, where the two exchanged words before Neves Valente fled.
Investigators believe Neves Valente killed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro (pictured) in his Massachusetts home two days after he carried out the Brown University mass shooting
At one point, John says he yelled out ‘Your car is back there, why are you circling the block?’
Neves Valente responded ‘I don’t know you from nobody’ and then repeatedly asked John, ‘Why are you harassing me?’ according to the affidavit.
John told police he eventually saw Neves Valente approach the Nissan sedan once more and decided to walk away.
As police shared images of the person of interest in the shooting – now identified as Neves Valente – John began posting on the social media forum Reddit that he recognized the suspect.
He theorized that police should look into ‘possibly a rental’ gray Nissan. Reddit users urged him to tell the FBI, and John said he did.
‘I’m being dead serious,’ John’s Reddit post said. ‘The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental.’
‘I know because he used his key fob to open the car, approached it and then something prompted him to back away,’ he wrote.
‘When he backed away, he relocked the car. I found that odd so when he circled the block, I approached the car that is when I saw the Florida plates.’
This is John, the homeless Reddit user who led police to the Brown University shooter Claudio Neves Valente. John had several encounters with Neves Valente before Saturday’s attack
The FBI released this photograph showing Neves Valente (left) and a man – later identified as John (right) – who was ‘in proximity’ of the gunman on the day of the shooting
Police learned about the tip on December 16, three days after the shooting and a day after the tip line was created, the affidavit said.
Up until that point, the police affidavit says officials had not connected a vehicle to the possible shooter.
That detail led them to get more video of a Nissan Sentra sedan with Florida plates and enabled Providence police officers to tap into a network of more than 70 street cameras operated around the city by surveillance company Flock Safety.
Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national, was found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Investigators believe he is responsible for fatally shooting two students and wounding nine other people in a Brown University lecture hall last Saturday.
He then killed Loureiro, who was also Portuguese, two days later at his Brookline, Massachusetts home, nearly 50 miles from Providence.
As far as investigators know, Neves Valente acted alone.
This is John’s Reddit post, which police said led to the break in the case
Neves Valente was enrolled at Brown University as a graduate student studying physics from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001. He currently has no affiliation with the university,’ university president Christina Paxson said.
Neves Valente and Loureiro – who is also Portuguese – previously attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000.
Loureiro graduated from the physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, in 2000, according to his MIT faculty page.
The same year, Neves Valente was let go from a position at the Lisbon university, according to an archive of a termination notice from the school’s then-president in February 2000.
Neves Valente studied at Brown on a student visa. He eventually obtained legal permanent residence status in September 2017.
It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017. His last known residence was in Miami.
After officials revealed the suspect’s identity, President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program that allowed Neves Valente to stay in the United States.
