An inside account of police investigation
Updated Dec. 20, 2025, 11:00 p.m. ET
- A five-day manhunt for the Brown University shooter involved multiple law enforcement agencies and tested investigators, says Providence police Maj. David Lapatin, who led the investigation.
- Police pursued four unsuccessful leads before a crucial break put them on the path to the suspect.
- Neves Valente was also responsible for killing an MIT professor before taking his own life in a New Hampshire storage facility, authorities said.
Some of the first Providence police major crimes detectives to set eyes on the scene of the Brown University shooting arrived as tactical police officers escorted survivors from the building on Dec. 13.
The detectives arrived intermittently in the early minutes of an investigation that would test their skills and consume nearly all of their time over the course of five days.
At times, some would go without sleep for more than 30 hours, according to the person in charge, Providence police Maj. David Lapatin.
Investigators from a collection of agencies would grapple with four different leads, some more promising than others, before a fifth lead put them on the path of Claudio Neves Valente, the man who authorities say carried out the shootings at Brown, killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and then took his own life in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire.
The fifth lead, based in large part on aid from a Brown alumnus and Reddit poster and subsequent investigative accomplishments, was a long way off as the team assembled just after the shooting.
Investigators’ first view of the shooting scene
The leaders of the teams on the scene in those early minutes, including Lapatin, saw the victims, Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, in the auditorium-style classroom. They saw dozens of spent cartridge shells. Backpacks and other paraphernalia were strewn around. Bullets had penetrated some of the seats.
Lapatin spoke to a small group of detective supervisors.
“I just told them, ‘Look, we’ve got to take the chaos out of our heads and just concentrate,'” he says.
“They all stepped to it,” he recalls. “They’re all professionals.”
Investigators from the crime scene processing team, the Bureau of Criminal Identification, were on the job. Agents from the many federal agencies were already on their way to join in the manhunt. State police handled emergency calls and some routine calls.
Managing the surviving students safely and appropriately for investigative purposes was one of the tasks at hand. They were removed from the building.
“We wanted to keep as many as we can in a safe place so we could question them later,” Lapatin says.
As the survivors waited to talk to detectives, investigators wanted the group at least separated from other people prior to the interviews. The preference, to separate such witnesses from each other, wasn’t possible based on conditions.
“We didn’t have much choice,” Lapatin said.
“There was a lot of them, a lot in the beginning,” he added, saying that there were also a lot of police officers with them as well.
Were investigators worried the killer might be in the group?
“That was always a thought, but we really didn’t think so, because, you know, we had some people saying the suspect went out the door,” Lapatin says.
A person who walks away from the shooting rather than running
Other investigators were already in a room at Brown University where screens showed video from campus surveillance cameras. A clip recorded by a camera drew attention, Lapatin says.
“And what stood out was this man,” Lapatin recalls.
“This man, you know, in dark clothing with the face mask, which at the end turned out to be the suspect,” he says.
The man was not holding a gun in the video that was drawing the most attention.
“It was after the shooting,” Lapatin said.
“He was walking,” he said. “Everybody else was running.”
In time, investigators would come to believe that the gun was hidden.
“Our belief was that he had the satchel now under his coat, with the gun inside,” Lapatin says.
A large police force gathers
Lapatin and other detectives set up a command post in a building next door.
Calls flowed in from other law enforcement agencies. Federal personnel from the FBI, ATF and Homeland Security Investigations joined the scene.
Providence police were “leading” the investigation, Lapatin says.
“That was without question,” he says.
A lead agency has to be established for organizational reasons, he says.
It was important to make sure there were no “wildcat” investigators and “that everybody is on the same page.”
Early lead fails to pan out
Two major leads took shape during the first 12 hours of the investigation, Lapatin says.
One, based on a tip from an “outside agency,” involved a person who had applied for a gun permit, Lapatin says.
The information involved a person staying at the Hampton Inn in Coventry just off Interstate 95. He was detained as a person of interest before dawn early Sunday morning, Dec. 14.
The investigators saw “some guns and other things,” Lapatin says. They needed to look into it further.
“And that’s what they did. They checked him out.”
The news that someone had been detained was a relief for Rhode Islanders.
But not for investigators, according to Lapatin.
And when the Coventry lead failed to pan out, investigators were not saddled with a big emotional letdown either, he says.
They had never let their hopes lift that high in the first place, Lapatin says, adding that their search for other leads had continued without pause.
“We never skipped a beat,” he said.
A second lead emerges
A second tip worthy of investigation had also emerged early Sunday morning, Lapatin says: Multiple people had referred police to a man who lived near the university.
Brown had sent out an email asking anyone who was in the building to contact police. The same man called to tell police he had been in the building the day before the shooting.
“He had an alibi and he was cleared,” says Lapatin.
How different law enforcement agencies worked together
By late morning on Sunday, Dec. 14, the base of the investigation had moved from Brown to the third floor of police headquarters at the Providence Public Safety Complex.
“We decided we needed to take this back to our home grounds,” Lapatin says.
The large suite of offices that houses Providence detectives, as well as the department’s new Real Time Crime Center, is on one end of the floor.
In a separate section at the other end, investigators set up in a room where they could work on the tips that were flowing into the station on a designated phone line that was advertised to the public.
The Providence police team that processes crime scenes for evidence, led by Lt. Robert Papa, remained at Brown with their counterparts in the FBI.
By Lapatin’s estimate, at this point, a group of 200 investigators were working “in and out” of the complex. Investigators did not work alone.
The first daylight on Sunday helped.
Lapatin says they knew what they would do. They needed to methodically collect and view as much video as possible in the neighborhoods close to the scene and then work outward.
“It’s one of our best chances of solving the case,” Lapatin said.
However, other investigators stayed at the safety complex.
“We had two rooms filled with people on computers,” he said. “That’s all they did, sit on the computers all day. And then in the Real Time Crime Center, there was more people on computers. These people sat there for hours and hours and hours and just went through things without moving.”
Most of them were FBI analysts.
Lapatin says he had made contact with Wing Chau, the U.S. Marshal for Rhode Island. Chau added marshals to the massive force of investigators.
Agents from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and Homeland Security Investigations were already part of the team.
At Lapatin’s request, Brown police Lt. John Carvalho, also the acting deputy chief of Brown’s police department and a former Providence police sergeant, joined the team in place on the third floor.
Some of the special technology from the FBI could help gather information from cellular communications. The bureau also had special tech tools for dealing with video and for quickly checking on criminal history, Lapatin says.
The ATF personnel contributed skills and capabilities for analyzing firearms and spent ammunition and shells. Some rounds that were not fired at the scene were found at the scene. They were checked for DNA. Some samples were obtained.
The evidence was driven to Connecticut’s state crime lab in Meriden for analysis.
The Providence police remained the lead investigative agency, Lapatin says. Still, they prepared for the possibility of supporting a case for prosecution in federal court if necessary.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F. Neronha is a former U.S. Attorney, and two high-ranking prosecutors in his office – Deputy Attorney General Adi Goldstein and the chief of Neronha’s criminal division, Stephen Dambruch – also had extensive experience as federal prosecutors.
They were in a group of prosecutors stationed in Lapatin’s office.
The tip center had about 15 investigators working the phones and recording the tips. Workflow benefited from an FBI system that funneled the tips into a bin where everyone could see them, Lapatin says.
“And the other thing that’s going,” Lapatin says, “that’s full force now, is our Real Time Crime Center.”
The crime center, which launched this past summer, has links to more than 300 live cameras, police say.
If investigators looking at those cameras can identify a suspect or person of interest to follow, the center is designed to help them track the person across multiple video feeds from one location to another.
The center is not staffed around the clock, Lapatin says.
“If something happens, we always have somebody who can jump right in there,” he says, adding that somebody was probably in the center “minutes” after the shooting.
Three calls about one person
On Monday morning, Dec. 15, as the public reacted to news about the Coventry lead not panning out, investigators focused on a third tip.
Three different calls, each of them regarding the same man, were received in the tip center, Lapatin says.
The man’s size and physique lined up. One caller said they thought the man might have worked at Brown in the past.
The investigation surveilled the person.
“That involved watching him go through his daily routines,” Lapatin says.
Investigators hoped to pick up something, perhaps some trash, that would provide a sample of DNA.
“We had a team on him, waiting for an opportunity to get some DNA,” he says.
The work on that angle of the case would continue for days, even as the investigation ultimately focused heavily on Neves Valente.
Switching to a search by grids
As of late Monday night, investigators had gone through thousands of minutes of video.
On Tuesday morning, they established seven grids to search for video, Lapatin says. Prior to this, the search for cameras was organized by individual streets.
The search for video gained organization and efficiency by examining each house for potential cameras. Sometimes, street investigators obtained video. Other times, specialists went to extract the video. Lapatin estimates that each grid had 100 or 150 properties.
“It was time-consuming,” he says. “I know people were anxious. It was being worked.”
Investigators hoped that a surveillance video would lead them to a better image of the masked suspect or even to a car associated with him.
“So lead three is hanging out there,” Lapatin says. “Lead one’s gone. Lead two is gone.”
Reddit post provides crucial tip
On Tuesday a post on Reddit started to draw a lot of attention from investigators.
The post referred to a gray Nissan with Florida plates parked by the Rhode Island Historical Society. It also mentioned a man who’d acted strangely, locking and unlocking the car with a key fob.
“It looks pretty good,” Lapatin says.
Investigators, based on video from the area, were already aware of movements by the masked man on Cooke Street prior to the shooting as well as some sort of contact he’d had with another person.
But their video did not show any car, Lapatin says.
And they would learn that that other person was the Reddit poster.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Dec. 16 and 17, long before they finally interviewed the Reddit poster on Wednesday night, investigators worked to track down a gray Nissan with a Florida plate.
Hunt for a gray Nissan with a Florida license plate
The gray Nissan represented the fourth major lead in the case. Investigators focused on a woman who owned such a vehicle with a Florida plate. When the detectives looked into it, they found that the vehicle had been observed in the area.
Also, the woman had a close relative who may have fit the profile, Lapatin says.
After a lot of surveillance, they felt the lead wasn’t the strongest, Lapatin says. They talked to the woman at work and corroborated that she had told them the truth about where she had been during the time in question. That lead was ruled out.
“It was a fluke,” Lapatin says.
Key break: A blue Nissan emerges
The fifth and final lead, the one that would take police to the shooter, a Miami man, emerged as investigators continued to look for a Nissan of any color with a Florida plate.
Capt. Dennis P. O’Brien said that more than 100 investigators had worked stints of more than 20 hours at a time, or longer, without sleep. O’Brien recalls working 31 hours on one shift. The teams didn’t quit on the Nissan.
Providence police detectives, including Detective Joseph Nezier and Detective Mitch Guerra, and state police Detective Sgt. Robert Hopkins and several others, digested great amounts of video to try to see the Nissan in the area. They also ran searches within the system of networked license-plate reading cameras on the East Side.
The information provided by the system showed that a blue Nissan had been on North Main Street, at Randall Street near Whole Foods, on dates in early December and in the area on the day before the shooting, Lapatin says.
The blue Nissan was identified in the North Main Street, Doyle Street, Camp Street area, Lapatin says.
By Wednesday afternoon, investigators had the name of the man who had rented the car. They were familiar with his connections to Brown University. They had an image of him at Alamo Rent A Car in Boston, where he had rented the car on Dec. 1.
Simultaneously, investigators were still working to make contact with the man who had authored the post on Reddit.
To get his IP address, investigators had to get a subpoena, Lapatin says, adding that the FBI handled that.
On Wednesday night, investigators interviewed the Reddit poster.
The man who wrote the Reddit post had graduated from Brown University in 2010, Lapatin says. Where he actually lived wasn’t perfectly clear to investigators, Lapatin acknowledges. Detectives didn’t push that issue.
“We needed to know more important information,” he says.
It was clear that the man, who has a cell phone, had spent a lot of time on the streets, frequently used the bathroom in the engineering building and was familiar enough and protective enough to spot someone who didn’t belong there, Lapatin says.
“So he comes in,” Lapatin says, referring to the Reddit poster, “and he’s very well-spoken. And he explains exactly what happened.”
The masked man had raised his suspicions during an encounter in the building.
His post on Reddit, about a gray Nissan, had channeled the investigation toward Neves Valente.
“That was it from there, the hunt was on,” Lapatin says.
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