Providence Mayor, Police Chief Honored at College Basketball Game After Brown Shooter Investigation
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Providence Mayor Brett Smiley and Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez received loud applause at Friday night’s men’s college basketball game between Providence and Seton Hall.
The cheers came a day after local authorities found dead the suspected gunman who shot and killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor earlier this week in Salem, New Hampshire.
Smiley and Perez came under national scrutiny in the days after the shooting because their investigation included the arrest of an innocent man who was mistaken for the suspect and questionable transparency with the public throughout the manhunt.
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The investigation lasted six days before authorities located the alleged shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a Salem storage unit on Thursday.
The surrounding community spent days waiting for answers, and residents were on edge after the school sent students home shortly after the shooting.
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Detectives initially questioned a person of interest at a hotel on the outskirts of town, but they ruled him out as a suspect, according to authorities.
Police spent days scouring the neighborhood for surveillance video, which Images of a person of interest emerged: a stocky, masked figure who stood about 5 feet 8 inches tall and walked with an odd gait.
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Neves Valente, 48, was a Portuguese citizen and studied physics at Brown from fall 2000 to spring 2001, according to Brown President Christina Paxson. But he took a leave of absence and finally retired in 2003.
Neves Valente’s motive has not been determined and is still under investigation.
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Jackson Thompson is a sports reporter for News Digital covering critical political and cultural issues in sports, with an investigative lens. Jackson’s reporting has been cited in federal government actions related to Title IX enforcement and in mainstream media outlets such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The News and ESPN.com.