The shocking news out of Providence that the man accused in the Brown University massacre was reportedly seen near campus roughly two weeks before the attack should set off alarm bells for every parent with a child on a college campus. Law enforcement now says that surveillance and investigative work traced a Nissan with Florida plates rented by the suspect weeks earlier, underlining how close this threat had been to campus before the bloodshed.
A homeless man who sleeps in a campus building basement and later posted a tip on Reddit played a crucial role in moving the investigation forward, according to officials who call his account “outstanding.” He told police he watched the man circle the block and recognized the vehicle behavior as suspicious, a tip that investigators corroborated with surveillance video and license-plate reader data. Americans should applaud citizens who step up in a crisis while demanding institutions make it easier, not harder, to act on warning signs.
Authorities have identified the suspect as Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente, a Portuguese national whom investigators say had some prior study time at Brown, and he was later found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot in a New Hampshire storage unit. The tragic conclusion—two students dead, nine wounded, and the accused found deceased—leaves families and communities with painful questions about how this was allowed to happen. No one should be satisfied until those questions are answered plainly and quickly.
There is also growing frustration with how the investigation unfolded publicly, from limited camera coverage in parts of the building where the shooting occurred to the release and then reassessment of persons of interest, which only fuels public anxiety. Brown’s president says parts of the wing had few, if any, cameras; that’s a failing of campus security planning that university leaders must own. If our elite institutions cannot secure classrooms and laboratories, they should not be sanctuaries of complacency.
Conservatives are right to point out that this episode intersects with broader failures of national policy: officials confirm the suspect was a Portuguese national with a last known address in Miami and reportedly a legal permanent resident, raising questions about vetting, tracking, and enforcement. This isn’t about xenophobia; it’s about the commonsense duty of a sovereign nation to know who is in its territory and to keep dangerous people away from our children. Until Washington fixes its porous systems, tragedies like this will keep happening.
At the same time, the heroism of everyday citizens and the effectiveness of modern investigatory tools deserve recognition. License-plate readers, neighborhood cameras, and ordinary people paying attention cracked this case open—technology and civic virtue together can save lives when law-abiding Americans are allowed to use them. If progressives want to gut these tools in the name of privacy fetishism, they should answer the grieving parents whose children might have been saved by quicker action.
Finally, the public deserves full transparency and swift accountability: university administrators must explain why vulnerable parts of campus were under-monitored, and local and federal officials must explain how a man alleged to have rented cars and moved between states remained unflagged. We owe it to the victims to stop rehearsing excuses and start fixing the failures—secure campuses, stronger commonsense immigration controls, and resources for law enforcement that actually work. America’s students deserve nothing less.
