A homeless man came across the Portuguese suspect and even exchanged a few words. Now you can receive a reward from the FBI worth 50 thousand dollars.
On Tuesday, US police released new images of the perpetrator of the attack at Brown University. The photographs and They showed a man, dressed in black, wearing a mask and hat, walking through the city streets.
As the man remained at large, authorities appealed for the public’s help in identifying the individual.
On social media, several people shared an FBI post asking for information about the day of the attack. It was on the Reddit platform that a comment appeared that caught the attention of several people.
The user “Lamin_kaare”, a homeless person and former student at Brown University, responded to the appeal with a request to the authorities. Lamin suggested that police investigate a gray Nissan with Florida license plates.
“The car was parked in front of a small shed behind the Rhode Island Historical Society. He used the remote to open the car, approached it and, suddenly, something made him retreat. When he retreated, he locked the car again. I thought it was strange and, when he went around the block, I approached the car and that’s when I saw that the license plate was from Florida,” he wrote on Reddit.
According to the user, only identified as “John”, spoke to the authorities and said he had crossed paths with in a university bathroom two hours before the shooting. He says that at that moment he immediately became suspicious because the suspect’s clothes were “inadequate and inappropriate for the climate”.
John saw the suspect again on the street, next to the car, and, considering that he was behaving strangely, decided to follow him. After a few laps around the block, he asked him: “If your car is in the back, why is it circling the block?”
According to John’s testimony, the suspect replied: “I don’t know you from anywhere” and even asked why he was being bothered.
After this clue, the police followed the trail of the car and arrived at Cláudio Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese man from Torres Novas. This morning was inside the car, near a warehouse in Salem, New Hampshire.
The FBI was offering a $50,000 reward to anyone with information about the attack at Brown University. It is not confirmed whether John will receive this reward, but speaking to journalists, the FBI agent Ted Docks said that “it would be logical to think that he would be entitled to receive it”.
