But what got me was the tipster who blew wide open the case is reportedly a homeless Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building (a la South Korean film Parasite). It made me so sad but also not surprised, that building does have a single occupancy bathroom with showers; and no keycard access was needed in the evening until 7pm.
So it made sense to me that he or she would've used that building for shelter and comfort. Also it didn't boggle my mind at all that a Brown grad (from the picture, the tipster looked like a artistic Brown student vs. the careerist type) would be homeless - given that I known many of my classmates who have a certain personality, brilliant but also idealistic/uncompromising that made them brittle unfortunately in a society that rewards conformity, settling and stability.
I can't get over the fact that two Brown student whom presumably have fallen on the wayside of society have chosen two different paths, (1) the homeless guy who still perseveres even in the basement of Barrus & Holley for 15 years a la Parasite after 2010 graduation but still has the situational awareness and rises to the occasion to give the biggest tip to the Providence Police, (2) the other guy who harbors so much resentment over a course of 25 years to plan a trip from Florida to gun down innocent kids who are 18 and 19 and his classmate when they were 18 and 19 year old.
Very similar story of:
- he was older
- dressed normally
- everyone assumed he was an assistant coach, grad student etc
They mentioned it multiple times in safety briefings and even at "how to be a club officer" meetings to ensure that everyone participating/involved was actually a student.
I bet every major university has a few people living/sheltering in campus buildings.
Then I took my boyfriend for a tour a couple years ago and found all the buildings had signs warning that access was only permitted with a University ID card. Nobody challenged us or kicked us out, but it was a sour demoralizing shock.
The main public buildings are generally open again during the day at least. I don't go in as much as I used to. (And have ID in any case.) But definitely not as open as it used to be.
I can't help but suspect that sometimes it may be related to graduate school itself, which can be stressful and unforgiving, with minimal support, and where supervisors often hold both academic power over their students' futures and financial power over their livelihoods. (And switching supervisors, even at the same institution, typically requires restarting research from scratch.) It can't be good when, after a lifetime of top-tier success, you are facing failure for the first time, with no preparation for handling it and no obvious path forward.
A lot of people also are doing research they think will benefit the world, so it's not just about failing in a personal quest -- you feel you are letting down all of humanity if you do not achieve your goals.
I dropped out of a PhD -- took the master's I earned for coursework, did my quals so it would be clear I chose to leave, then took an "academic-ish" job that paid very poorly. I'd hoped to do that a bit then get hired by a big tech company, but I found out that you have less free time in a job than grad school, and my tech skills began to erode, further sending me down a path I did not want.
What caused me immense, IMMENSE distress is that I felt, for lack of a better term "involuntarily destitute" -- my adviser in grad school had told me that she'd ONLY give me a positive reference for "research" jobs, and that trying to leave for industry was evidence I had lied my way into the program, and thus she could not give me a positive reference for any roles without a research component.
I feel that she purposefully tried to "trap" me with her -- she was having trouble recruiting new students as word of her behaviors and convictions spread (she'd racked up a DUI during the liminal period between my acceptance and starting school, among other gems).
I currently work in a job that has nothing to do with my field -- I had many, many years of strife because when I was fresh out of college, I looked around my hometown and found I couldn't even get a helpdesk job because my skillset was that of an open source nerd, and they wanted people who could answer questions about the UI of Windows like "How do I enable this printer" that, having not used it for years, I couldn't answer off the top of my head -- and it's not sustainable to "just Google it" on calls over and over, people will get frustrated with the wait times.
(That was the way people generally broke into infosec back then -- get a help desk job at a bank, hospital or university, study during downtime, maybe do some certs or try to do an interesting project to present at a conference, move up to sysadmin, and eventually security analyst/engineer)
I thought I'd found a third way -- I could do this PhD, and at worst leave with a master's, and sidestep the tedium of the help desk and the uncertainty of if I'd move up. (I knew people who got worked many hours, struggled to study up, and got trapped).
Anyways, academia can be incredibly abusive and downright medieval. That's not an excuse for violence, but it is an explanation.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/us/mit-professor-shooting...
(But I did find this article better than the WaPo one)
Since this site has a lot of people who have successful tech careers, many of us are isolated from these stresses.
But honestly, this guy's turn to violence makes me suspect he had some serious issues driving him, possibly in the mental health realm. Most people, even economically distressed people, won't turn to murder.
But as with many of these situations the truth might not make sense-- sometimes it's simply irrational thinking by someone mentally unwell. It reminds me a bit of the Reiner killings as well, considering there too there's no clear motive except maybe a hypothetical mental break. Truthfully, we might just never have a satisfying answer as to why this tragedy happened.
You "suspect possible mental health issues"? Amigo, what further evidence could possibly be required?
It was posted on a Fox News affiliate. He won't get the reward, because he called 911 rather than the tipline.
Makes me furious, but it doesn't surprise me.
But a number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective. A terrible event all around.
I disagree. The shooter’s victims fell to a random act of violence. (As in the victims were randomly selected. The shooter didn’t randomly occur.)
It is tragic. But it was a crime committed by one man, now dead, who targeted the innocent.
The tipster is more than innocent. He is a hero. His eviction is not a random act of cruelty, but a result of his heroism. And his assailants aren’t a monster, whom we don’t expect to strive for goodness, but us.
I expect monstrous actions from all humankind, though. What sets “us” apart from deviants is the deftness of our self-justification.
I'm drawing a moral analogy to mass murder, so the whole thing is going to tend towards the unhinged. But I'll stand by it. There is something sad in ordinary people bending to banal evil. Monsters being monsters is just horrific.
The building owners do have a right to occupy their own building, right? Or are you proposing we deny them their ownership as some kind of reward to the hero? That would amount to advocating that two wrongs make a right.
Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.
Why not give him cash or a job or something else?
Not what was said.
> Why not give him cash or a job or something else?
Sure. Why not.
The characterization of “us” as “assailants” is an acknowledgment of the sorrowful fate that we as a society inflict on nearly every whistleblower despite the fact that we as a society encourage people to be whistleblowers.
(You forgot to use logic or explain a point of view and instead just made a random moral judgement and expressed the emotion it made you feel, so I had to make some assumptions about your intentions and depth of thought)
And I'm not just saying that as a reaction, I really want to know how you could have possibly interpreted the above comment to get that reaction. Please explain.
> How a Reddit post blew Brown University shooting investigation wide open
> Frustration had mounted that the murderer had managed to get away and that a clear image of his face hadn't emerged - until a Reddit post finally put police on his trail.
Life imitates art.
Many in tech will quote Steve Jobs "you can't connect the dots forward, only backwards" speech, but this guy whom I don't know, I like to believe he lived it. Flip your question on your head, would you be willing be homeless for 10 years and in the process help catch a school shooter?
And even for valuable degrees, the advantage yielded is far less than you might think. It's not like the movies where you have dozens of companies begging you to come work with 6 figure starting salaries and fat bonuses up front. You open a few more doors, and people have a better than average initial impression of you, but at the end of the day - it's not a world-shifting advantage. The overall edge in outcomes is not because of the university, but because of the sort of people that the university admits. The sort of guy who graduates class president, valedictorian, wrestled at state, and with a near perfect score on his SAT is going to do disproportionately well in life completely regardless of whether he ends up at MIT, Party U, or just skips university altogether.
And (so I'm told) at least half the value of an Ivy degree is the people you meet while you are there. I guess that assumes you do some network-building, which maybe not everyone does.
The ability required to get into an ivy is so significant I don’t see how someone could fail to make substantial sums if they wanted to.
Also, imo the "Ivy" advantage is moreso a "family background" advantage - traditionally high social prestige and high entry barrier vocations were gatekept by Ivy and Ivy-adjacent membership.
The rise of competitive salary and low barrier of entry vocations like Software and Accounting helped dampen the value of that "Ivy" premium.
Most Ivy League schools have free tuition if your parents household income is below $200-$100k and full ride room and board if below $100-60k.
Rich kids can get cut off from their parents.
Where exactly did I imply that it was the cost of the degree that is the constraint? Everyone knows poor kids and even middle class kids don’t pay anything to go to elite schools. I simply don’t think that means they face financial constraints exiting undergrad (or during undergrad). Why would they when HRT is paying $500k for new grads?
There’s this weird belief that I should feel sorry for people that didn’t come from means but got into Yale or Brown or Stanford. Sorry, they’re just as alien and inrelatable to me as Jeff Bezos’ kids. These people are in an entirely different plane of existence and ability so I have a lot of trouble thinking they wouldn’t have unlimited opportunities exiting university that I can’t even dream of.
I think it's the biggest response I've personally seen since the Boston Marathon Bombing.
if anything this whole saga makes me happy smart people aren't killers more often because this guy basically got away...
What exactly is the expectation here? Is there some sort of wide-spread belief that the world works like an episode of Law and Order and every crime is instantly solved by rolling up your sleeves and doing good old fashioned detective work?
Would assume for the majority of planned murder to be resolved as quickly as these highly publicized cases have been (the Kirk deal took about 2 days also) there's going to have to be an element of luck. Piecing together digital/forensic evidence is going to require time and effort. If it's not an obvious connection (domestic violence etc.) and there's no direct witnesses it seems logical you only have a few outcomes:
A) Going to be solved due to a lucky break
B) Going to be solved after a ton of time/interviews/piecing together forensic evidence
C) Not be solved.
Also he only "got away" because he killed himself. They likely would have caught him fairly soon after this because they had his identity from the car tags. I guess the point is though luck is all you have if it's solved this quickly because it's so random.
In a democracy you need to show the voters you're doing work.
There is to a point, and it's not some random organic sentiment: this is the image that has been crafted for decades, if not centuries. The police has a role in pushing it, but it's also has been a useful fiction for our societies as a whole.
"crime will somewhat get punished" has more weight with a competent agency with at least average intelligent people.
D) Going to be "solved" by catching someone unfortunate who seems plausible enough and lacks an alibi.
As for the expectation, other than if civil liberties are going to be violated in the name of safety I expect much faster results, and I’m sure the MIT professors family would agree.
Of course the family wants it solved right away but there's a reality to this that seems to be overlooked here but is also not unique here. A lot of murders are never solved. Luck is a factor all the time.
I'm not really sure what you think I'm arguing.
The more effort a state puts into surveiling its population, the more effort law enforcement will put into suppressing dissent, and less into addressing crimes targeting the general populous.
That is not true. There was no pressure on unabomber brother - he "ratted" him out entirely on own will. Also Elliot Rodgers parents called police after they read the manifesto - before any pressure happened. Ex wife of DC shootings had restraining order on him, feared him, and when police asked whether she thinks he is capable of violence like that her first answer was "yes".
The thing also is, these people are often assholes in their own lives, toward relatives too. They tend to have track record of domestic violence and abuse.
We do have criminals who fold, either they're too confident, they trip up, etc. Recently some guy killed his sugar-momma in Fla, then took her car and drive it cross country to Seattle and along the way used her CC. He gave it all away in the jail interview.
Bla bla bla, prosecutors are the good guys and show all the evidence they have....
Um, not.
We keep finding again and again we're putting innocent people in jail even for things as serious as capital crimes, and later it was found the investigation was botched and there was no evidence that person was guilty and other evidence was never presented.
Now he doesn't have to worry about paying for that. Or getting reasonable treatment but hey,
Tells me he knew he was going to be caught and is angling for a hung jury.
Like presumably the US has doorbell camera databases and every car on the highway is electronically flagged?
Ring cameras and other cameras still require warrant. Same for the data that Flock collects
That data is now one and the same though:
https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/flock-safety-and-ring-partn...
Titanic basically sailed safely across the Atlantic, except for a bit of bad luck.
(Because then it would have hit the berg head on, crushing the front, but not ripping most of the side open.)
>Everyone's a superhero
>Everyone's a "Captain Kirk"
He appears to have attended the same undergraduate program in Portugal as the MIT professor.
Therefor it seems possible that these shootings were carried out of personal resentment, though only he knew for certain.
Anyone have the Reddit link? (I wonder why the article doesn't include it)
Good on him for reporting what he saw. He also went to the police the next day and reported it directly. But now the media machine is going to make him regret he ever said anything, which is unfortunate.
> Now the media machine is going to make him regret he ever said anything
We’ll see how it turns out, but I don’t see why even the internet mob would hate him. He probably can’t live in Brown’s basement anymore, but maybe with the reward money and recognition he can find a real place.
> John said that the suspect’s clothing was inappropriate for the weather and that they had made eye contact.
Why is the report mentioning the eye contact? Is that culturally significant, as in, in the US you don’t normally do eye contact with strangers, and if a stranger does make eye contact, it’s suspicious?
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/us/brown-mit-shooting-inv...
In cities people tend to not make eye contact while walking by each other, though in smaller towns it is more common to acknowledge each other in passing.
In neither case would it be accurate to find eye contact suspicious. The sentence appears to be a summation of several things the person saw, convincing them poorly and creating the ambiguity.
That is not the case. If there was more high quality footage with a clearer resolution and full coverage to the time the suspect went to the car, then it would have been trivial to locate them without a witness.
I will say that there is a non-zero overlap of people pushing this insanity and the posters here, given what I've seen elsewhere on the internet, and I will kindly ask that you stop.
School shootings in particular and mass shootings in general tend to follow a particular pattern. Usually the shooter has no intention of escaping or otherwise leaving the scene. Usually they are killed at the scene either by the police or by their own hand. Some do escape but it's rare.
So this shooter allegedly escaped the scene and then a couple of days later went on to kill one particular researcher at a different college 50 miles away in what looks like it was targeted and planned.
These are two very different crimes.
And then the shooter commits suicide?
If the MIT researcher was a target, why commit a mass shooting prior? If the mass shooting was the goal, how do we explain the planning and intent of the second attack? And why wasn't that a mass shooting?
Was it the same gun in both attacks? If so, why weren't the incidents linked sooner? If they were different guns, that too raises questions.
In case it wasn't clear, the MIT attack was cased for at least 2 weeks prior.
These media companies love tragedies like this. It is what makes them the most money. Why would they disable ads on their most lucrative pages?
Sorry, but it seems very brittle as a story.
The most probably answer from the facts we have is quite simple and human... Jealousy. They both were classmates in the same overseas undergrad program, Nuno was a well established and accomplished professor in one of the preeminent tech schools in the world. While he flunked out of his program, and hasn't done much of note.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91463942/sequoia-shaun-maguire-b...
Every time he’s involved in a new scandal I’m surprised all over again that he’s still a partner and Sequoia still hasn’t pressured him to stop.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/conspiracy-rumors-...
What an asshole. He could have gotten the kid killed, not to mention the damage to his social reputation. And he can't even manage a "sorry if you were offended" non-apology.
Anyway, when he went after the Brown student saying he was "very likely" the shooter (also bringing in Mamdani again), he did less: he simply deleted the video.
In what world is it good or right to dox a random undergrad based on speculation, simply because maybe just maybe it will net you Internet points? Note that Maguire never apologized once it became clear he was wrong; he simply deleted the post. He gets to keep the engagement and outrage points and move on, paying no price for spreading a dangerous lie. The undergrad he and others doxxed can't say the same.
Shaun would be just another rage-baiter if it wasn't for the Sequoia imprimatur. With an investor like this on your cap table, who needs enemies? It shouldn't matter if Shaun is the "Elon guy" at Sequoia or indeed the best investor in the world. Integrity should and does precede returns in time. But maybe I am naive and this just isn't true for megacap venture as an asset class, where so much depends on sidling up to the 50 or 100 founders who can reliably produce decacorns to return your fund.
Perhaps all we can do is vote with our feet. Sequoia is on my cap table today, but if I was fortunate to have the choice between them and a similar firm that actually demonstrated integrity instead of just talking about it, I would not take money from them again. In all likelihood they won't care a whit about me, but they may care more about some of you, reading this.
I'm sorry, don't take this the wrong way, did you smoke pcp before writing this?
> Maguire, acting as a self-appointed digital detective, has shared posts suggesting that an entirely different man was behind the crimes—a Palestinian student at Brown University...
> On July 4, Maguire made inflammatory comments calling New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani an “Islamist.”
Jokes aside, maguire does seem like an emphatically despicable person
>> Maguire clearly "comes from a culture that lies about everything."
I'm trying to understand the downvotes and if people think you said what they said
> Maguire clearly "comes from a culture that lies about everything."
This is a reference to Shaun Maguire's Twitter post where he said that Zohran Mamdani "comes from..."
https://x.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1941135110922969168
> > Maguire is Jewish, with ancestral ties to early Jewish settlers in California.
> Sir, we are going to have to ask you to leave.
This comment appears to be reacting to the first one by assuming the first one is saying that Jewish people lie about everything, and it responds by saying this is unacceptable to say.
I have been off Twitter for 2 months and when I go there I can't understand anything. People are always saying "can I say something?" and "we know what this means" and shit like that and either the 2 months have killed my brain or something because I never know what the first guy isn't going to say and the second guy knows.
Now Hacker News is similarly incomprehensible and I'm starting to think my mind is no longer able to handle human speech. If this is happening to anyone else, then I hope the interpretation helped. If it didn't, then maybe I'm just losing my mind.
I am disturbed that in-group code has been normalized as a way to state socially abhorrent positions out in the open, as if it offered plausible deniability.
If anyone has ever been confused by the concept of race being a cultural construct, here is an object lesson.
"Phil Helsel Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said a person who had information about the suspect played a crucial role in the case."