Brown Shooter Identified -- There Are Questions

The news that the Brown shooter, who also apparently killed MIT Professor Nuno Loureiro, has been identified as Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente doesn't seem to have been well covered by any media. Resal Clear Politics has nothing on it this morning, nor was it in my Google news feed. This story from the New York Post is probably as thorough as any, but it leaves a great many questions unasked. In the clip embedded above, Brian Llenas, a Fox reporter, posed just two of those many possible questions to the Providence police chief:

Why did it take a citizen to notice a suspicious person right next to Brown University and not the police? And also, how long was the vehicle parked where it was? Was it days, hours, minutes?

The chief's answer reveals how poor his communication skills are -- he just replies in a heavy, almost comical barrio accent, "Some people are more interested than others", which still raises the question of why the police weren't interested -- but that leads to other questions, like why nobody from Brown is taking the lead in answering questions, and why even the Providence police departmemt doesn't appear to have a public information officer, a standard position in police departments, who can take questions like this, because the chief certainly can't.

But for now, let's focus on "John", the homeless man whose cooperation was essential in helping identify Neves Valente.

John met with investigators after his image was shared publicly and said he had an odd "cat and mouse" interaction with the suspect, having encountered Neves Valente in a bathroom in Brown University's engineering building hours before the shooting, claiming his clothes were "inappropriate and inadequate for the weather." John was reported to be living in the basement of the engineering building at the time of the incident, sources with knowledge of the situation confirmed to FOX News.

The first question that pops up is, how can a homeless guy be living in the basement of Brown's Barus and Holley engineering building? Accounts say the building required cardkey access:

Although the building was open, students needed to scan badges to access classrooms and labs, school officials said. But hall traffic on that Saturday afternoon was unusually heavy because of the number of students either taking exams or preparing for them, according to reports.

But how long had "John" been living in the basement? And he'd run into Neves Valente in a bathroom in the building hours before the shooting, such that "John" was able to identify him wandering around the residential neighborhood later on. Had Neves Valente been living in his car for some period and using the bathroom in the Barus and Holley basement? How did both he and "John" get in if there is card access? This, of course goes to the question the Fox reporter asked, how come neither Providence police nor Brown campus police noticed his presence, potentially over a period of weeks?

But there's a second big question: as we see, accounts say that "John" was either a graduate or a one-time student at Brown. How can the economy not somehow find useful work for a graduate of an elite university, especially someone characterized by Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha this way:

“He was incredibly articulate, and his testimony, had we needed it, would not only have been credible—it would have been persuasive. He was as outstanding a witness as I’ve seen.”

This looks like the sort of person any employer would be delighted to have -- he noticed something important, followed up, even at personal risk, and went to a great deal of trouble to get his message across, at which he did an outstanding job. Why is this man homeless? We must assume as well that "John" must owe these qualities in some way to Brown, where his character must have been formed at least in part. Why was Brown unable to put him in a position where these qualities could be properly employed?

I have a lot of questions about "John", and I hope we learn more about him and why his clear abilities have gone unrecognized. Of course, someone who notices something important, follows up, and is conscientious and articulate in making his points isn't always valued as an employee, or even a student. Just sayin'.

The next question I have continues to be why there's so little video evidence from anywhere on the Brown campus. The record of Neves Valente's wanderings is, at least so far, entirely from cameras in the residential area around the Brown campus. But if he was apparently in the area for weeks -- and he'd been a graduate student at Brown decades earlier -- he must have ventured onto the campus as well, but there seems to be no record. Had Brown in fact disabled its security cameras, as has been alleged?

But these are just preliminary questions.