I work on campus (very very close to the engineering building) and I previously lived near Brookline. So all of this hits home.
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.
There was a homeless guy living in the gym at Rutgers prior to the late 1990s and it's why you had to show ID to get into any of the gyms/dorms.
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.
It's not uncommon. University buildings are pretty open even today. I worked with a homeless guy who was a university employee, so he had a legit staff ID card. He just didn't want to spend money on rent. He knew where the empty rooms were that nobody ever used, where the showers were.
I bet every major university has a few people living/sheltering in campus buildings.
My somewhat anecdotal observation is that a lot of access has been tightened down. Some happened during COVID and was just never removed. It definitely varies. The campus I'm most familiar with, you could wander pretty freely and that's less the case today.
I feel really sad about this -- I was amazed as a child to learn that I was allowed to just... GO IN to buildings and lectures as long as I was quiet and respectful. I always took pride in my university's openness.
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.
Things were very locked down at the peak of COVID and some of us even semi-officially grumbled a bit to people we knew.
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.
Graduate student violence is more common that it should be. For example, you hear about suicides every year.
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.
Sadly so, students often associate their self-worth with research and academic achievement, so if things go south, for whatever reason, they are in crisis.
>Sadly so, students often associate their self-worth with research and academic achievement, so if things go south, for whatever reason, they are in crisis.
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 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.
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.
Perhaps I should have said something like intentional harm leading to death to make it clearer. But the person isn't any more alive even if they were somehow killed by some gentle, peaceful method.
Academic success perhaps. The killer and Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor he killed, were in the same class at Instituto Superior Técnico (Portugal's leading engineering school). Loureiro had a distinguished career at MIT while the killer was homeless.
Maybe he had some idea that his buddy ran away with and he attributed his success to his idea, while he was homeless? There was a whole TV show around a similar idea (Breaking Bad).
I don't know much about the suspect, but I do know that people have been saying for years that they go into deep debt to get degrees, even in things that are supposed to be respected or in demand, and then it turns out there is actually no job market or success path for that degree. I assume the implication is it had something to do with this kind of frustration. (Though the suspect went to school two decades ago and did not receive a degree)
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.
I think there’s a lot of projecting going on in these comments. The truth is we don’t know the motivation. Guessing at student debt seems unlikely given that he didn’t finish the degree, left the country, and made vague posts about deception on physics message boards around the time.
You misread me. I said "with this kind of frustration", meaning a broad category of frustration with the system of academia and education. That is not that 100% of the problem is student debt. It's that aspiring academics and scientists can have a hard time supporting themselves.
I haven't heard any clear motives yet. Some people are saying it's simply a case of someone who was a genius that ended up in a mediocre place in life, leading to to killing. Still that story is so common in America I don't see how it leads to killing innocent children at your alma mater? It makes no sense to me.
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.
Not at all obvious. I'm not sure why HN comments are overlooking that the killer was the same age, from the same country, and studied at the same undergrad university as the MIT professor while starting a graduate degree in the same field. We don't know the exact nature, but it is difficult to believe that these points are not highly involved with the motive.
At least when I was in school 15 years ago (math/engineering), a non- or partially-funded (including living stipend) grad school "acceptance" in the US was understood by all of my peers to be a rejection. I saw a post on reddit a few years ago saying that's still true and is in fact also true in the humanities (with an assumed TA role). Is that not accurate? Why are people going into debt for grad school? Did no one tell them you're not supposed to pay for it? Are they just unwilling to accept they were rejected?
I actually have tons of experience with people who suffer mental health issues, including psychotic illness. One thing that experience gives me is to be cautious about making armchair diagnosis from afar.
When we define criminality as evidence of mental illness, all we’ve done is medicalize criminality — which if anything hinders our ability to recognize abnormalities of the mind which may or may not lead to criminality.
"...the tipster who blew wide open the case is reportedly a homeless Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building..." Where did you read this?
I assume he will also no longer be able to live in the engineering hall basement. Beyond personal moral satisfaction, coming forward only means sacrifice.
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.
> number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective
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.
To be clear, there’s no actual evidence that he’s being evicted. Talking about “his eviction” is pretty premature. It also seems like he will receive the reward.
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.
Mass murder is about as far as you can get from banal. It's an extremely rare tragedy to experience. But we're talking about two things: one is a violent crime and one is a civil matter involving a squatter.
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.
> Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.
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.
Oh if he wasn't interferring, then they must have allowed him to keep living there? Why is that sad, you want him to be kicked out?
(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)
I think my logic is fine. You pulled reasons to get rid of him out of nowhere, not based on the facts of the case. Not just supporting a possible eviction but preemptively deciding it's the only way to get peaceful use of their building even though they were already getting peaceful use of their building. That's sad, because you're justifying a big punishment as consequence of doing a big good deed, with nobody benefitting.
And your first sentence makes no sense. That's not how people usually work. They get possessive and risk-averse and ban things that are unusual. That "if-then" is a total joke, and without it your criticism of my argument falls apart.
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.
What I heard is he called the police tip line and left a message but didn't hear back for two days. After two days he left this tip and then was made a person of interest. This is just what I heard, not sure if there's more to this story.
We'll have to wait to see how the Brown student's life turns out after. We'll see if he drives a way in an RV. Doubtful he'll be living in the basement after this though
I think Christina Paxson should hire him to be a director of patrol or more realistically a community liason for Brown campus police. The RI/FBI circus were all mum on whether the guy will receive the 50K reward - very on-brand. He wants privacy so I don't know even if there will be a GoFundMe but I think they should do the right thing and give the guy his 50 grand at the very least.
I agree 100%. The biggest example here is if you read and go back to the threads of HN before the downfalls of SBF and Liz Holmes, you'll see so many people on here worshipping them and apologists for their bad behavior. Most are corporate types are conformists who buy what they are told ('till the narrative are changed). It used to bother me but nowadays I just keep it pushing and aim for the tails and let the mid-curve people be the mid-curve people.
Some day while the dreaded soc* or comm* words have been abandoned, a better description might come along to account for the fact that in fact while the system is positive sum, reality can still seem zero sum to a large portion and there is only so much you can stifle the same human creativity, energy and desire to sustain themselves.
Many people are terrible judges of character. They either undervalue it, see it as weakness, or just aren’t able to discern the potential for malevolence.
Now compare these two divergent "endings": would you rather be gone from this cold and cruel Earth, finally free, or denied reward money for failing to call the correct phone number, still homeless and (probably) hungry? Obviously I am not saying to off a bunch of people prior, but still.
My response is there were many people (primarily engineering students and professors) who might have seen the shooter during the previous weeks - but it is only the former student who given his background of being homeless and being extra vigilante as a homeless person noticed the shooter as suspicious and even followed him to his car that led to the tip.
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?
My assumption is most Ivy leaguers (specifically undergrads) generally have no monetary constraints after graduating so this very much reads to me as a bohemian “by choice” decision to be more interesting than an actual tragic story.
This is definitely incorrect. If you graduate with a low-value degree from an Ivy League, you're still going to be just as unemployable as somebody that graduated from Party U with a low value degree. The only real difference is that at top schools there are less people that are completely directionless in life (since you're less likely to get admitted in such a case) so if somebody is graduating with e.g. a philosophy degree, then they're probably doing it explicitly with the intent of going to e.g. law school or on an academic path, whereas many people at lower ranked universities end up there largely through inertia and may pursue degrees of minimal value with no real thoughts beyond taking the easiest path to achieving a college degree, which is the direction they were pushed onto without ever really thinking about it.
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.
There are still a lot of jobs that (for maybe debatable reasons) require a college degree. Major is far less important. So if you have that degree, you at least have a larger job pool to work in. Of course, having a degree can overqualify you for some jobs, so it's not a purely better situation in all cases.
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.
There are plenty of directionless people in Ivy League who aren't emotionally invested in the paths their parents sent them, they just go into Finance or Consulting. And in those places, pedigree does matter alot, the actual skills are not as important as the cultural compatability.
BCG consultants and traders at Five Rings are very much not financially constrained after undergrad (about $100-200k difference between them but either way)
People have such an odd belief that the Ivy League is all trust-fund babies, even though for years and years, these schools have shown that they recruit disadvantaged people and make it affordable for them to attend.
What about what I said made you think I said everyone there had a trust fund? I have a problem with homeless to Harvard as much as I have a problem with billionaires kids at Yale. Do you not understand this? How can I be more clear?
I grew up in NYC and was lucky enough (or smart enough, I suppose) to get into one of the top public high schools in the city. Because of that (and doing well enough in that school), I was able to squeak into Cornell via its wait list.
But I don’t come from connections: my mother was a receptionist and my father was a sanitation worker. For a while after college, I managed to find work doing backend development for various local businesses, but nothing fancy. But even that has dried up due to various reasons (including a major health issue I developed after graduating).
For some reason, it seems people in authority positions are irked by me due to my humble beginnings & my insistence on continual learning, even after graduating from school. If I had a penny (or I guess now, nickel?) for every time an interviewer asked me, “How did you learn that when you majored in Industrial Engineering,” I’d be a very rich man.
Or at least able to afford all the books I want to read. :(
This generalization is very, very wrong. I can tell you, from my personal college network, many students had monetary constraints coming in, and many certainly had monetary constraints coming out. Some of that was choice of career path; some was not.
I don’t understand how someone coming out of Brown or Yale would have constraints coming out. Their degree is basically free, basically any degree can get them an analyst gig on Wall Street if they so choose, and at worst they can go down the law school path.
Statistically, you're correct. That said, the thing about statistics is that outliers exist.
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.
Rich kids do get cut off from their parents but that's usually when they get off the rails, e.g start doing drugs or drinking heavily, drop out of school. When attending university most of them get some form of support from their rich families.
I want to improve my communication skills so I’d love pointers on this.
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 live in the area. Crazy how many helicopters and drones showed up so quick and how many police there were. For several hours more and more police and FBI vehicles kept arriving. Probably ended up with close to 100 officers on scene. Salem NH PD, Methuen MA PD, Providence RI PD, NH state police, MA state police, FBI, and US Marshal service were the ones I saw.
I think it's the biggest response I've personally seen since the Boston Marathon Bombing.
all of that and they basically just got lucky. the guy walked to brown from his car parked nearby and shot up some kids, waited days, went to a guy's house in Massachusetts, killed him and never even got caught - he committed suicide and was only found days after his second killing
if anything this whole saga makes me happy smart people aren't killers more often because this guy basically got away...
I keep seeing this sort of sentiment everywhere and I'm trying to understand it. The same thing happened after Charlie Kirk was killed and the arrest there hinged on a confession by the killer to his dad. A lot of commentary then that the police/FBI got lucky. Ditto Mangione. They got lucky he was found in a random McDonalds.
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.
The sentiment is basically that the "all hands on deck" manpower effort is futile and if anything even a political/propaganda effort to dissuade others from having similar thoughts. What good is it to mobilize 1000 FBI agents if they aren't going to move the case forward at all? What good is having a budget capable of mobilizing that many people for a single case and not to bear any fruit with it? Is this outcome better than what might have happened if this were relegated to local PD? Surprisingly the answer is "no, not at all." That is a big indictment on federal law enforcement and their abilities to turn their budget into actionable effort that makes the population safer. And probably suggests that such resource draining manhunts might even come at the cost of whatever the FBI does in fact do well.
Half of life is collective "give a damn". If you see 1000 FBI agents, read 47 headlines, and hear a dozen gas station conversations then you start to tune in. That's when the tips start coming in, as everyone wants to be part of the big "thing".
It’s easy to criticize a police investigation after the suspect has been caught. But in the moment, none of the responding officers had a clue what they were walking into. Brown is a large campus in a strongly residential neighbourhood with many hiding spots; and people were ordered to shelter in place.
> 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?
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.
I disagree that his catching was inevitable. They only knew an identity yesterday. If the suspect wasn’t a coward it’s plausible they could’ve just driven away to literally any other part of the United States and then flew back to Portugal. I have no comment on the Kirk case.
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.
How could they possibly have solved it faster than this? There's no magic to this and it takes time like anything else. Yes there's digital footage but someone has to go through it. The murder in Massachusetts isn't immediately obviously related.
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 am not saying luck isn't a factor - you're missing my point which is we're compromising privacy and going further into a surveillance state, yet it's not like the actual outcomes are improving.
I have a theory, it would be great if someone would do a rigorous study to back me up! Ha. I'm most likely wrong, but anyway:
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.
Just checking, are you sure this is the story: "hinged on a confession by the killer to his dad." It seems that story is a-changing and that's an important note. My point might be that what is put out as the story often comes with an agenda.
I mentioned to someone that day that the person would be caught by a family member - that this stuff was looking more and more like Mangione - who was also primarily caught by his mom. That being said, the only reason family ends up ratting these people out is because of the high pressure it ends up on the family. If it turns out they find these people, and the family did not turn them in, they are going to the big house too.
> the only reason family ends up ratting these people out is because of the high pressure it ends up on the family.
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.
If you watch some of the real life detective / crime shows. The people who murder people and get caught be cops, basically shoot people in broad daylight on camera, tell people about it, then immediately fold in interrogation.
People often fold during an interrogation/questioning unless they are career criminals and have been through the system and learn from their prior mistakes/luck.
Sure, but in the 21st century people are typically not thrown in prison on the basis of a confession only. The prosecutors have to have corroborating evidence.
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.
In the 21st century, innocent people routinely accept plea deals to avoid the risk of trial. The corroborating evidence need not be strong because the threat of the trial penalty is enough when you can't afford a good lawyer.
>The prosecutors have to have corroborating evidence.
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.
Well, how exactly were they supposed to know he wanted a lawyer and not a lawyerdog, whatever that is? I don't even think that's a real thing! Clearly the suspect was crazy.
I believe the theory that Mangione even wanted to be caught and arrested because he didn't see a viable life for himself anymore with his spinal problems and medical bills. Who social engineers their way into getting a CEO's itinerary and then keeps a manifesto on their person well after the crime
Now he doesn't have to worry about paying for that. Or getting reasonable treatment but hey,
It's a fun theory that everyone likes to support but it falls apart when you read his Reddit account and realize he had insurance that paid for spinal fusion surgery and claimed to have no pain afterwards without the assistance of medication. That's probably also why he doesn't appear in any pain in his appearances since the incident, not because the NY DOC (infamous for their terrible healthcare) magically got him surgery instantly.
He became radicalized over time and even wrote that his pain was improved. Somewhere along the way he read something or got it into his head that he had to murder the United Healthcare CEO where he never was a customer. It was just one if not the largest healthcare insurance company.
In my country if the police is really serious, and I mean national crisis level of serious, they can go full China and track everyone. They have the means.
Like presumably the US has doorbell camera databases and every car on the highway is electronically flagged?
The Titanic disaster was a confluence of many instances of bad luck. Including the idea that if the lookout had noticed the berg a few seconds later, it wouldn't have sunk.
(Because then it would have hit the berg head on, crushing the front, but not ripping most of the side open.)
Maybe. The average homicide clearance rate in the US is only around 60%. But that includes a lot of killings where nobody really cares about anyone involved. This was a much higher profile crime so it would get a lot more attention. But there are high profile cases that get a lot of (at least local) attention that don't ever get solved either.
It is really difficult to ascertain motive and suspects when it’s a chronic homeless case getting murdered. It could be a thing from drugs to just looking at a crazy guy wrong one night, you literally have no leads unless there is a video or some other piece of hard evidence. It isn’t really about caring, judt that the environment they live in is so chaotic and uncontrolled that you’d have a suspect pool that is too big to reasonably investigate.
Same perspective here just 15 miles northwest of scene. Pretty sure they confirmed officially presence of MA NH LEO, NHSP, MASP, FBI, CIA, ATF, and Secret Service.
There are two types of broken clocks. One is always suspicious, the other thinks nothing ever happens. One is more often right than the other, but both are equally broken.
The arguments against seemed to show the weakness of frequentists in practical deduction..
It certainly could have been a domestic where the police already knew but weren't communicating it but otherwise most suggestions didn't match the statistics of the specific demographic/locations to compete with the anomaly of a total AWOL with good luck, nothing to lose and a connection to top academia who wasn't dead or in jail.
It’s unlikely the students at Brown killed were targeted. He opened fire on a room of students at a review session, shooting 11 people. It seems very possible that this was an act of violence out of resentment towards Brown, where he dropped out a graduate program over 20 years ago. He would’ve had most of his classes and spent most of his time in the building where he carried out the shooting.
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.
I feel sorry for this guy. His Reddit inbox is probably fucked, and he's absolutely going to get doxxed and hounded by news people, and I wouldn't be surprised if even worse things happened to him.
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.
He’s already public, but he can make a new Reddit account.
> 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.
This is admittedly very tangential only, but as a non-native speaker / not a US-American, I found this sentence from the NYT reporting[0] a bit confusing:
> 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?
I think the eye contact in question was a prelude to the two of them kind of following each other around and a minor verbal altercation, so the later context shows that it was probably kind of suspicious eye contact, rather than a friendly "what's up?"
I agree with the other comments that this sentence is just poorly written.
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.
Obviously a lot of footage in investigations does not reach the public, during active ones or even after. But if you've followed these stories it seems liket between the Brown shooting and the Kirk/Utah shooting, there is a potential concern with universities not having security footage in certain areas of their campus? Has anyone else inquired more into this?
Well, Candace Owens and Valhalla VFT are talking about exactly those things and the MSM is saying their concerns are baseless. I can't believe I actually watched Candace Owens discuss some of this stuff, I shudder to write that.
Owens is unhinged. She's also claiming the French government are trying to have her killed because she's claiming their first lady is secretly transgender. It's not just the "MSM" who are pointing out she has no credibility, it's also people like Ben Shapiro from her same corner of the media.
I mean, yes? The cameras do help solve a ton of crime. The real issue is using them for surveillance without a cause, and that imo this is what should be under scrutiny. But trying to fight cameras existing in general is a lost cause imo
i was at the cvs right next to the extra storage when the helicopters showed up and all the police it was kinda nuts to be so close to an event like this.
The thing that bothers me about the whole story, apart from the deaths of course, is that we live in a surveillance state. While I want major crimes to be resolved and there to be deterrents to future ones, I just don't know about turning the whole US into East Germany. It's not going to work out well for any of us. As you can see, it didn't help solve the crimes, either. It was witnesses who did all the heavy lifting here.
> As you can see, it didn't help solve the crimes, either. It was witnesses who did all the heavy lifting here.
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.
There are going to be many, many questions about this because a lot of it doesn't make sense and doesn't fit any profile.
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.
I hate to bring this up, but the conspiracy theories around this are nuts and I'm honestly quite bothered and annoyed by it. While the death is an absolute tragedy, the idea that the CIA killed him because fusion is around the corner and I suppose Loreiro was to usher in the next age of limitless electricity is quite ridiculous.
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.
It's very silly to say they "love" them. It's unlikely anyone is happy this happened. They are a news company, they report news, and people are interested most of all in bad things that have happened.
No it's not silly. These companies would be at a tiny fraction of their current revenue if people didn't like reading bad news and especially terrible tragedies. How much do you think their page views spike when there is an active manhunt or major events that happen? From a business perspective: they love them.
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.
> Maguire subsequently partially apologized for those comments in a video. “This tweet did not land the way I thought it would,”
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.
The "did not land" video they're talking about, that was his response to people being mad at him for calling Mamdani an Islamist (and being "from a culture that lies about everything"). Also, "partially" is doing a lot of work there: he starts that video saying "cancel culture is alive and well" and doesn't in fact back off at all from his claim: the "did not land" part is even just Maguire lamenting that he accidentally helped Mamdani by targeting him.
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.
I can't express how puzzled I am that Maguire is still at Sequoia. Forget cancellation; anyone should be free to say whatever they want. This is about judgment, humility, discretion and dare I say empathy, which are fundamental skills in any investment process and which a partner at the most storied venture fund in the word ought to have.
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 mostly surprised that someone can so consistently and repeatedly demonstrate an inability to filter information he receives and still be trusted with LPs' money. It's another form of Gell-Mann amnesia.
Rich guys are mainly incompetent. They'll tell you they're rich because of meritocracy, but I've found that too much money has the opposite effect. You end up surrounded by yes-men and can buy your way out of any failure, so your skills (if you ever had em) atrophy.
Everyone knows sequoia can't invest... but this is too far
> 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 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.
Thanks for the explanation -- I also had no idea what this meant.
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.
Another shooting with random or unclear motives, which conveniently fits an anti-immigrant narrative, also conveniently tied up with a bow... Don't get too caught up in the specifics of the spectacle, and take a long view of really weird coincidence.
sadly flock ended up being helpful here (according to the police per the article). also interesting that it was some random homeless guy who happened to be there that blew the whole thing wide open. despite all of the surveillance...
How can you not read this and just see it's a huge puff piece for Flock. As far as I can read from the first article and reports they were not pivotal in tracking down the killer. It was once again only someone else who knew that person and came forward, exactly the same as Tyler Robison case
"Phil Helsel Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said a person who had information about the suspect played a crucial role in the case."
If there's any claim that "flock found these two plates were seen in both areas!!111" then how many other plates were seen in both areas in the same timeframe? How much of this is throwing away results that disagree with the narrative?
I work on campus (very very close to the engineering building) and I previously lived near Brookline. So all of this hits home.
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.
There was a homeless guy living in the gym at Rutgers prior to the late 1990s and it's why you had to show ID to get into any of the gyms/dorms.
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.
It's not uncommon. University buildings are pretty open even today. I worked with a homeless guy who was a university employee, so he had a legit staff ID card. He just didn't want to spend money on rent. He knew where the empty rooms were that nobody ever used, where the showers were.
I bet every major university has a few people living/sheltering in campus buildings.
RMS famously lived out of his office at MIT for a while.
RMS = Richard Stallman, responsible for the GNU project and the free software foundation.
He had a page dedicated to his housing situation:
https://stallman.org/seeking-housing.html
https://web.archive.org/web/20190928065654/https://stallman....
RMS could life couch surfing from conference to conference?
My somewhat anecdotal observation is that a lot of access has been tightened down. Some happened during COVID and was just never removed. It definitely varies. The campus I'm most familiar with, you could wander pretty freely and that's less the case today.
I feel really sad about this -- I was amazed as a child to learn that I was allowed to just... GO IN to buildings and lectures as long as I was quiet and respectful. I always took pride in my university's openness.
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.
Things were very locked down at the peak of COVID and some of us even semi-officially grumbled a bit to people we knew.
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.
But resentment over what? I haven't seen anything on this.
Graduate student violence is more common that it should be. For example, you hear about suicides every year.
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.
Sadly so, students often associate their self-worth with research and academic achievement, so if things go south, for whatever reason, they are in crisis.
>Sadly so, students often associate their self-worth with research and academic achievement, so if things go south, for whatever reason, they are in crisis.
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 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.
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.
Graduate school violence == suicide?
Perhaps I should have said something like intentional harm leading to death to make it clearer. But the person isn't any more alive even if they were somehow killed by some gentle, peaceful method.
That has a clear definition which I doubt is what is occurring?
Or are you asserting that these folks are getting locked up and tortured until they kill themselves?
Academic success perhaps. The killer and Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor he killed, were in the same class at Instituto Superior Técnico (Portugal's leading engineering school). Loureiro had a distinguished career at MIT while the killer was homeless.
Maybe he had some idea that his buddy ran away with and he attributed his success to his idea, while he was homeless? There was a whole TV show around a similar idea (Breaking Bad).
Im pretty certain that of plagiate software would include rejected students works whole swaths of the academic successful would be let go.
Jealousy is really the sickest of sins…
This article was helpful:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/19/us/mit-professor-shooting...
https://archive.is/qypoz
That definitely doesn't explain things. It appears the motive is still unknown
(But I did find this article better than the WaPo one)
I don't know much about the suspect, but I do know that people have been saying for years that they go into deep debt to get degrees, even in things that are supposed to be respected or in demand, and then it turns out there is actually no job market or success path for that degree. I assume the implication is it had something to do with this kind of frustration. (Though the suspect went to school two decades ago and did not receive a degree)
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.
I think there’s a lot of projecting going on in these comments. The truth is we don’t know the motivation. Guessing at student debt seems unlikely given that he didn’t finish the degree, left the country, and made vague posts about deception on physics message boards around the time.
You misread me. I said "with this kind of frustration", meaning a broad category of frustration with the system of academia and education. That is not that 100% of the problem is student debt. It's that aspiring academics and scientists can have a hard time supporting themselves.
No I understood. Your guess that it was related to finances is just a guess.
I haven't heard any clear motives yet. Some people are saying it's simply a case of someone who was a genius that ended up in a mediocre place in life, leading to to killing. Still that story is so common in America I don't see how it leads to killing innocent children at your alma mater? It makes no sense to me.
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.
The most obvious motive seems to be a vendetta against higher education.
Not at all obvious. I'm not sure why HN comments are overlooking that the killer was the same age, from the same country, and studied at the same undergrad university as the MIT professor while starting a graduate degree in the same field. We don't know the exact nature, but it is difficult to believe that these points are not highly involved with the motive.
At least when I was in school 15 years ago (math/engineering), a non- or partially-funded (including living stipend) grad school "acceptance" in the US was understood by all of my peers to be a rejection. I saw a post on reddit a few years ago saying that's still true and is in fact also true in the humanities (with an assumed TA role). Is that not accurate? Why are people going into debt for grad school? Did no one tell them you're not supposed to pay for it? Are they just unwilling to accept they were rejected?
"this guy's turn to violence makes me suspect he had some serious issues driving him, possibly in the mental health realm"
You "suspect possible mental health issues"? Amigo, what further evidence could possibly be required?
I actually have tons of experience with people who suffer mental health issues, including psychotic illness. One thing that experience gives me is to be cautious about making armchair diagnosis from afar.
If someone else had posted exactly the same thing you just did, I would have assumed it was supposed to be funny…
When we define criminality as evidence of mental illness, all we’ve done is medicalize criminality — which if anything hinders our ability to recognize abnormalities of the mind which may or may not lead to criminality.
This whole post is filled with a ridiculous amount of unfounded assumptions.
I am not American but there was a good interview on American homelessness in TMR: https://youtu.be/osFQMTJz1w8
> in a society that rewards conformity, settling and stability.
It also rewards value generation, often above the other things
Value defined how and for whom? Single parents without paying work provide an enormous amount of value but often can't get housing.
"...the tipster who blew wide open the case is reportedly a homeless Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building..." Where did you read this?
https://kfanplus.iheart.com/content/2025-12-19-homeless-man-...
It was posted on a Fox News affiliate. He won't get the reward, because he called 911 rather than the tipline.
FWIW, The New York Post video on this said he will get the reward.
That doesn't surprise me at all.
Makes me furious, but it doesn't surprise me.
I assume he will also no longer be able to live in the engineering hall basement. Beyond personal moral satisfaction, coming forward only means sacrifice.
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.
> number of people have lost their lives, which keeps the scale of the tipster's personal losses in perspective
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.
> 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.
To be clear, there’s no actual evidence that he’s being evicted. Talking about “his eviction” is pretty premature. It also seems like he will receive the reward.
Last sentence went a little insane.
> Last sentence went a little insane
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.
Mass murder is about as far as you can get from banal. It's an extremely rare tragedy to experience. But we're talking about two things: one is a violent crime and one is a civil matter involving a squatter.
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?
> Calling the building owners 'assailants' for simply wanting to peacefully occupy their own building is quite insane.
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.
This is conflating whistleblowing with the need to pay rent on your residence. This guy is not exactly a Julian Assange.
> Mass murder is about as far as you can get from banal
Not what was said.
> Why not give him cash or a job or something else?
Sure. Why not.
He wasn't interfering with the building owners. You're making up a justification to screw this guy over. That's really sad.
Oh if he wasn't interferring, then they must have allowed him to keep living there? Why is that sad, you want him to be kicked out?
(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)
I think my logic is fine. You pulled reasons to get rid of him out of nowhere, not based on the facts of the case. Not just supporting a possible eviction but preemptively deciding it's the only way to get peaceful use of their building even though they were already getting peaceful use of their building. That's sad, because you're justifying a big punishment as consequence of doing a big good deed, with nobody benefitting.
And your first sentence makes no sense. That's not how people usually work. They get possessive and risk-averse and ban things that are unusual. That "if-then" is a total joke, and without it your criticism of my argument falls apart.
[flagged]
The fuck are you talking about?
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.
https://news.sky.com/story/how-a-reddit-post-blew-brown-univ...
> 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.
That says he's a reddit poster, not a Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building.
A lot of reddit posters live in basements, a subset of which are in the engineering building.
Most Reddit posters are children. What of it? How does "he was a Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building" follow?
Those two descriptions are not mutually contradictory.
What I heard is he called the police tip line and left a message but didn't hear back for two days. After two days he left this tip and then was made a person of interest. This is just what I heard, not sure if there's more to this story.
And...?? How does "he was a Brown graduate who lived in the basement of the engineering building" follow? Wtf?
Im a bit worried for the homeless guy, he helped solve the case but he likely blew up his cover and will have to find a new shelter.
Lazlo Hollyfield.
Life imitates art.
We'll have to wait to see how the Brown student's life turns out after. We'll see if he drives a way in an RV. Doubtful he'll be living in the basement after this though
I think Christina Paxson should hire him to be a director of patrol or more realistically a community liason for Brown campus police. The RI/FBI circus were all mum on whether the guy will receive the 50K reward - very on-brand. He wants privacy so I don't know even if there will be a GoFundMe but I think they should do the right thing and give the guy his 50 grand at the very least.
there is so much systemic failure and it says a lot about the people who are elevated by society and the people who are demonized.
I agree 100%. The biggest example here is if you read and go back to the threads of HN before the downfalls of SBF and Liz Holmes, you'll see so many people on here worshipping them and apologists for their bad behavior. Most are corporate types are conformists who buy what they are told ('till the narrative are changed). It used to bother me but nowadays I just keep it pushing and aim for the tails and let the mid-curve people be the mid-curve people.
Some day while the dreaded soc* or comm* words have been abandoned, a better description might come along to account for the fact that in fact while the system is positive sum, reality can still seem zero sum to a large portion and there is only so much you can stifle the same human creativity, energy and desire to sustain themselves.
Many people are terrible judges of character. They either undervalue it, see it as weakness, or just aren’t able to discern the potential for malevolence.
Now compare these two divergent "endings": would you rather be gone from this cold and cruel Earth, finally free, or denied reward money for failing to call the correct phone number, still homeless and (probably) hungry? Obviously I am not saying to off a bunch of people prior, but still.
My response is there were many people (primarily engineering students and professors) who might have seen the shooter during the previous weeks - but it is only the former student who given his background of being homeless and being extra vigilante as a homeless person noticed the shooter as suspicious and even followed him to his car that led to the tip.
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?
that's why there will be a day of judgement that God has set
Everyone truly evil believes that they are the good one and God wouldn’t punish them.
My assumption is most Ivy leaguers (specifically undergrads) generally have no monetary constraints after graduating so this very much reads to me as a bohemian “by choice” decision to be more interesting than an actual tragic story.
This is definitely incorrect. If you graduate with a low-value degree from an Ivy League, you're still going to be just as unemployable as somebody that graduated from Party U with a low value degree. The only real difference is that at top schools there are less people that are completely directionless in life (since you're less likely to get admitted in such a case) so if somebody is graduating with e.g. a philosophy degree, then they're probably doing it explicitly with the intent of going to e.g. law school or on an academic path, whereas many people at lower ranked universities end up there largely through inertia and may pursue degrees of minimal value with no real thoughts beyond taking the easiest path to achieving a college degree, which is the direction they were pushed onto without ever really thinking about it.
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.
There are still a lot of jobs that (for maybe debatable reasons) require a college degree. Major is far less important. So if you have that degree, you at least have a larger job pool to work in. Of course, having a degree can overqualify you for some jobs, so it's not a purely better situation in all cases.
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.
There are plenty of directionless people in Ivy League who aren't emotionally invested in the paths their parents sent them, they just go into Finance or Consulting. And in those places, pedigree does matter alot, the actual skills are not as important as the cultural compatability.
BCG consultants and traders at Five Rings are very much not financially constrained after undergrad (about $100-200k difference between them but either way)
People have such an odd belief that the Ivy League is all trust-fund babies, even though for years and years, these schools have shown that they recruit disadvantaged people and make it affordable for them to attend.
What about what I said made you think I said everyone there had a trust fund? I have a problem with homeless to Harvard as much as I have a problem with billionaires kids at Yale. Do you not understand this? How can I be more clear?
I graduated from an Ivy and, after graduation, I was (and continue to be, to this day) dirt poor.
I have some doubts about this, or at least what your definition of dirt poor is.
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.
I grew up in NYC and was lucky enough (or smart enough, I suppose) to get into one of the top public high schools in the city. Because of that (and doing well enough in that school), I was able to squeak into Cornell via its wait list.
But I don’t come from connections: my mother was a receptionist and my father was a sanitation worker. For a while after college, I managed to find work doing backend development for various local businesses, but nothing fancy. But even that has dried up due to various reasons (including a major health issue I developed after graduating).
For some reason, it seems people in authority positions are irked by me due to my humble beginnings & my insistence on continual learning, even after graduating from school. If I had a penny (or I guess now, nickel?) for every time an interviewer asked me, “How did you learn that when you majored in Industrial Engineering,” I’d be a very rich man.
Or at least able to afford all the books I want to read. :(
This generalization is very, very wrong. I can tell you, from my personal college network, many students had monetary constraints coming in, and many certainly had monetary constraints coming out. Some of that was choice of career path; some was not.
I don’t understand how someone coming out of Brown or Yale would have constraints coming out. Their degree is basically free, basically any degree can get them an analyst gig on Wall Street if they so choose, and at worst they can go down the law school path.
Statistically, you're correct. That said, the thing about statistics is that outliers exist.
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.
Your assumption is ignorant.
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.
Rich kids do get cut off from their parents but that's usually when they get off the rails, e.g start doing drugs or drinking heavily, drop out of school. When attending university most of them get some form of support from their rich families.
I want to improve my communication skills so I’d love pointers on this.
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 live in the area. Crazy how many helicopters and drones showed up so quick and how many police there were. For several hours more and more police and FBI vehicles kept arriving. Probably ended up with close to 100 officers on scene. Salem NH PD, Methuen MA PD, Providence RI PD, NH state police, MA state police, FBI, and US Marshal service were the ones I saw.
I think it's the biggest response I've personally seen since the Boston Marathon Bombing.
all of that and they basically just got lucky. the guy walked to brown from his car parked nearby and shot up some kids, waited days, went to a guy's house in Massachusetts, killed him and never even got caught - he committed suicide and was only found days after his second killing
if anything this whole saga makes me happy smart people aren't killers more often because this guy basically got away...
I keep seeing this sort of sentiment everywhere and I'm trying to understand it. The same thing happened after Charlie Kirk was killed and the arrest there hinged on a confession by the killer to his dad. A lot of commentary then that the police/FBI got lucky. Ditto Mangione. They got lucky he was found in a random McDonalds.
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.
The sentiment is basically that the "all hands on deck" manpower effort is futile and if anything even a political/propaganda effort to dissuade others from having similar thoughts. What good is it to mobilize 1000 FBI agents if they aren't going to move the case forward at all? What good is having a budget capable of mobilizing that many people for a single case and not to bear any fruit with it? Is this outcome better than what might have happened if this were relegated to local PD? Surprisingly the answer is "no, not at all." That is a big indictment on federal law enforcement and their abilities to turn their budget into actionable effort that makes the population safer. And probably suggests that such resource draining manhunts might even come at the cost of whatever the FBI does in fact do well.
Half of life is collective "give a damn". If you see 1000 FBI agents, read 47 headlines, and hear a dozen gas station conversations then you start to tune in. That's when the tips start coming in, as everyone wants to be part of the big "thing".
A lot of fiction will be generated too
Then it’s a good thing you have a lot of people available to sort through it!
There is always going to be a PR element in police efforts.
In a democracy you need to show the voters you're doing work.
The society of the spectacle needs a spectacle!
It’s easy to criticize a police investigation after the suspect has been caught. But in the moment, none of the responding officers had a clue what they were walking into. Brown is a large campus in a strongly residential neighbourhood with many hiding spots; and people were ordered to shelter in place.
Isn’t that hindsight bias?
> 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?
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.
You're missing a 4th and unsettling option:
D) Going to be "solved" by catching someone unfortunate who seems plausible enough and lacks an alibi.
I disagree that his catching was inevitable. They only knew an identity yesterday. If the suspect wasn’t a coward it’s plausible they could’ve just driven away to literally any other part of the United States and then flew back to Portugal. I have no comment on the Kirk case.
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.
How could they possibly have solved it faster than this? There's no magic to this and it takes time like anything else. Yes there's digital footage but someone has to go through it. The murder in Massachusetts isn't immediately obviously related.
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 am not saying luck isn't a factor - you're missing my point which is we're compromising privacy and going further into a surveillance state, yet it's not like the actual outcomes are improving.
I'm not really sure what you think I'm arguing.
I have a theory, it would be great if someone would do a rigorous study to back me up! Ha. I'm most likely wrong, but anyway:
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.
Portugal extradites.
Just checking, are you sure this is the story: "hinged on a confession by the killer to his dad." It seems that story is a-changing and that's an important note. My point might be that what is put out as the story often comes with an agenda.
This is a reference I think to the Charlie Kirk murder.
I mentioned to someone that day that the person would be caught by a family member - that this stuff was looking more and more like Mangione - who was also primarily caught by his mom. That being said, the only reason family ends up ratting these people out is because of the high pressure it ends up on the family. If it turns out they find these people, and the family did not turn them in, they are going to the big house too.
> the only reason family ends up ratting these people out is because of the high pressure it ends up on the family.
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.
If you watch some of the real life detective / crime shows. The people who murder people and get caught be cops, basically shoot people in broad daylight on camera, tell people about it, then immediately fold in interrogation.
People often fold during an interrogation/questioning unless they are career criminals and have been through the system and learn from their prior mistakes/luck.
Innocent people often fold during interrogation.
Sure, but in the 21st century people are typically not thrown in prison on the basis of a confession only. The prosecutors have to have corroborating evidence.
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.
In the 21st century, innocent people routinely accept plea deals to avoid the risk of trial. The corroborating evidence need not be strong because the threat of the trial penalty is enough when you can't afford a good lawyer.
https://innocenceproject.org/coerced-pleas/
>The prosecutors have to have corroborating evidence.
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.
wrong. confession is the pimary way most people get convicted
Or unless they exercise their right to remain silent.
Yes but if you do it wrong then your silence can be used against you. And if you ask for a lawyer slightly incorrectly then that doesn't count either.
Well, how exactly were they supposed to know he wanted a lawyer and not a lawyerdog, whatever that is? I don't even think that's a real thing! Clearly the suspect was crazy.
D) the FBI stitches it up to protect the real criminals and brings out some poor fool to take the blame.
I believe the theory that Mangione even wanted to be caught and arrested because he didn't see a viable life for himself anymore with his spinal problems and medical bills. Who social engineers their way into getting a CEO's itinerary and then keeps a manifesto on their person well after the crime
Now he doesn't have to worry about paying for that. Or getting reasonable treatment but hey,
It's a fun theory that everyone likes to support but it falls apart when you read his Reddit account and realize he had insurance that paid for spinal fusion surgery and claimed to have no pain afterwards without the assistance of medication. That's probably also why he doesn't appear in any pain in his appearances since the incident, not because the NY DOC (infamous for their terrible healthcare) magically got him surgery instantly.
He became radicalized over time and even wrote that his pain was improved. Somewhere along the way he read something or got it into his head that he had to murder the United Healthcare CEO where he never was a customer. It was just one if not the largest healthcare insurance company.
I can’t speak to his thinking, but being caught with the gun used, and a confession letter…
Tells me he knew he was going to be caught and is angling for a hung jury.
In my country if the police is really serious, and I mean national crisis level of serious, they can go full China and track everyone. They have the means.
Like presumably the US has doorbell camera databases and every car on the highway is electronically flagged?
Flock is around but it’s not as prevalent as some would want you to believe. At least not yet.
Ring cameras and other cameras still require warrant. Same for the data that Flock collects
> 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...
It depends where you are. most cities in the US have them everywhere now
"this guy basically got away"
Titanic basically sailed safely across the Atlantic, except for a bit of bad luck.
The Titanic disaster was a confluence of many instances of bad luck. Including the idea that if the lookout had noticed the berg a few seconds later, it wouldn't have sunk.
(Because then it would have hit the berg head on, crushing the front, but not ripping most of the side open.)
But they found him? If he was alive, he probably would have been caught eventually, no?
Maybe. The average homicide clearance rate in the US is only around 60%. But that includes a lot of killings where nobody really cares about anyone involved. This was a much higher profile crime so it would get a lot more attention. But there are high profile cases that get a lot of (at least local) attention that don't ever get solved either.
It is really difficult to ascertain motive and suspects when it’s a chronic homeless case getting murdered. It could be a thing from drugs to just looking at a crazy guy wrong one night, you literally have no leads unless there is a video or some other piece of hard evidence. It isn’t really about caring, judt that the environment they live in is so chaotic and uncontrolled that you’d have a suspect pool that is too big to reasonably investigate.
I mean I guess all criminals die or are caught, yes.
Being smart doesn't guarantee you'll get away with murder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_and_Loeb
Sometimes criminology students kill people, apparently as research: Bryan Kohberger, Nasen Saadi.
Actually being smart guarantees you won't have to.
Na, if you're smart you just start a company and have it kill people via industrial accident, then it's just a fine.
50% of murders are unsolved
Same perspective here just 15 miles northwest of scene. Pretty sure they confirmed officially presence of MA NH LEO, NHSP, MASP, FBI, CIA, ATF, and Secret Service.
Every agency has to show how relevant they are.
Like the song 99 red balloons:
>Everyone's a superhero
>Everyone's a "Captain Kirk"
My apologies to the guy who first proposed that the shootings were related--I thought that was a real stretch.
Unless there was a reason to believe they were related, I wouldn't apologize to a broken clock.
There are two types of broken clocks. One is always suspicious, the other thinks nothing ever happens. One is more often right than the other, but both are equally broken.
The arguments against seemed to show the weakness of frequentists in practical deduction.. It certainly could have been a domestic where the police already knew but weren't communicating it but otherwise most suggestions didn't match the statistics of the specific demographic/locations to compete with the anomaly of a total AWOL with good luck, nothing to lose and a connection to top academia who wasn't dead or in jail.
It was a stretch, but that didn't mean it wasn't possible.
yeah, very surprising
What was the motive? The targets seemed unique. One the VP of the Republican student club and the other a prominent Jewish physicist.
It’s unlikely the students at Brown killed were targeted. He opened fire on a room of students at a review session, shooting 11 people. It seems very possible that this was an act of violence out of resentment towards Brown, where he dropped out a graduate program over 20 years ago. He would’ve had most of his classes and spent most of his time in the building where he carried out the shooting.
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.
> John posted about the encounter on Reddit after the shooting
Anyone have the Reddit link? (I wonder why the article doesn't include it)
https://www.reddit.com/r/providence/comments/1pnkwoq/comment...
https://old.reddit.com/r/providence/comments/1pnkwoq/fbi_pos...
I feel sorry for this guy. His Reddit inbox is probably fucked, and he's absolutely going to get doxxed and hounded by news people, and I wouldn't be surprised if even worse things happened to him.
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.
He’s already public, but he can make a new Reddit account.
> 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.
This is admittedly very tangential only, but as a non-native speaker / not a US-American, I found this sentence from the NYT reporting[0] a bit confusing:
> 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...
I think the eye contact bit is useful as a signal that the witness got a very good look at the suspect's face.
I think the eye contact in question was a prelude to the two of them kind of following each other around and a minor verbal altercation, so the later context shows that it was probably kind of suspicious eye contact, rather than a friendly "what's up?"
I agree with the other comments that this sentence is just poorly written.
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.
I suppose that made eye contact = the face was clearly visible for a second or two, and thus recognized with more certainty.
Obviously a lot of footage in investigations does not reach the public, during active ones or even after. But if you've followed these stories it seems liket between the Brown shooting and the Kirk/Utah shooting, there is a potential concern with universities not having security footage in certain areas of their campus? Has anyone else inquired more into this?
I'm sure Flock's sales team has made inquiries.
That’s funny, picturing their sales team smirking and rubbing their hands mischievously at every publicized manhunt
Well, Candace Owens and Valhalla VFT are talking about exactly those things and the MSM is saying their concerns are baseless. I can't believe I actually watched Candace Owens discuss some of this stuff, I shudder to write that.
Owens is unhinged. She's also claiming the French government are trying to have her killed because she's claiming their first lady is secretly transgender. It's not just the "MSM" who are pointing out she has no credibility, it's also people like Ben Shapiro from her same corner of the media.
exactly what we need, more cameras everywhere
I mean, yes? The cameras do help solve a ton of crime. The real issue is using them for surveillance without a cause, and that imo this is what should be under scrutiny. But trying to fight cameras existing in general is a lost cause imo
i was at the cvs right next to the extra storage when the helicopters showed up and all the police it was kinda nuts to be so close to an event like this.
The thing that bothers me about the whole story, apart from the deaths of course, is that we live in a surveillance state. While I want major crimes to be resolved and there to be deterrents to future ones, I just don't know about turning the whole US into East Germany. It's not going to work out well for any of us. As you can see, it didn't help solve the crimes, either. It was witnesses who did all the heavy lifting here.
Our surveillance state is mostly for commercial and political reasons. It doesn’t exist for crime fighting
> As you can see, it didn't help solve the crimes, either. It was witnesses who did all the heavy lifting here.
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.
This is a good point and worth noting because we sacrifice so much for the supposed benefits.
It's almost like the claim that you live in a surveillance state is hugely overblown.
There are going to be many, many questions about this because a lot of it doesn't make sense and doesn't fit any profile.
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.
I hate to bring this up, but the conspiracy theories around this are nuts and I'm honestly quite bothered and annoyed by it. While the death is an absolute tragedy, the idea that the CIA killed him because fusion is around the corner and I suppose Loreiro was to usher in the next age of limitless electricity is quite ridiculous.
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.
You'd think the washington post would have figured out how to turn off ads on somber articles by now
Legacy media gets a pass from advertisers.
Legacy of bezos now.
Oh how naive you are...
Its amazing people are downvoting this
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?
It's very silly to say they "love" them. It's unlikely anyone is happy this happened. They are a news company, they report news, and people are interested most of all in bad things that have happened.
No it's not silly. These companies would be at a tiny fraction of their current revenue if people didn't like reading bad news and especially terrible tragedies. How much do you think their page views spike when there is an active manhunt or major events that happen? From a business perspective: they love them.
It does not make sense why kill Loureiro.
Sorry, but it seems very brittle as a story.
The answer is, no one can know for sure.
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.
Worth noting that a partner at Sequoia (Shaun Maguire) publicly accused the wrong guy of being the shooter.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91463942/sequoia-shaun-maguire-b...
Shaun Maguire has a long history of inflammatory comments and pushing false information on Twitter.
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.
I'm impressed he hasn't been fired and sued into bankruptcy.
It's because they agree with him.
Graeme Wood (always a good read) on this:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/conspiracy-rumors-...
> Maguire subsequently partially apologized for those comments in a video. “This tweet did not land the way I thought it would,”
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.
The "did not land" video they're talking about, that was his response to people being mad at him for calling Mamdani an Islamist (and being "from a culture that lies about everything"). Also, "partially" is doing a lot of work there: he starts that video saying "cancel culture is alive and well" and doesn't in fact back off at all from his claim: the "did not land" part is even just Maguire lamenting that he accidentally helped Mamdani by targeting him.
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.
Oh - thank you very much for the correction, I must have been reading the article too quickly!
I can't express how puzzled I am that Maguire is still at Sequoia. Forget cancellation; anyone should be free to say whatever they want. This is about judgment, humility, discretion and dare I say empathy, which are fundamental skills in any investment process and which a partner at the most storied venture fund in the word ought to have.
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.
> This is about judgment, humility, discretion and dare I say empathy, which are fundamental skills in any investment process
I'm sorry, don't take this the wrong way, did you smoke pcp before writing this?
The whole VC industry is poison at this point.
It's like a lottery for rich people.
Why are you downvoted? VC's mostly give money to rich kids from prestigious schools. VC's basically hate the poor and want nothing to do with them.
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I'm mostly surprised that someone can so consistently and repeatedly demonstrate an inability to filter information he receives and still be trusted with LPs' money. It's another form of Gell-Mann amnesia.
Rich guys are mainly incompetent. They'll tell you they're rich because of meritocracy, but I've found that too much money has the opposite effect. You end up surrounded by yes-men and can buy your way out of any failure, so your skills (if you ever had em) atrophy.
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Everyone knows sequoia can't invest... but this is too far
> 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
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Unvelievably's current comment says
But given yours, did they originally say what you quoted?I'm trying to understand the downvotes and if people think you said what they said
Everyone is talking in some kind of weird in-group code or in-jokes that I can't understand so I'll decipher it for the rest of us normies.
> 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.
Thanks for the explanation -- I also had no idea what this meant.
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.
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I hate everyone involved in this. It’s like a confluence of every type of perma-victim with immense privilege.
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>ctrl-f "gun control"
>0 results
Never change, HN.
How did banning drugs work out? Alcohol?
Instead, there are people arguing for increased surveillance. Which even if implemented "correctly" would not prevent crime.
Might be used to track women seeking abortions though.
Another shooting with random or unclear motives, which conveniently fits an anti-immigrant narrative, also conveniently tied up with a bow... Don't get too caught up in the specifics of the spectacle, and take a long view of really weird coincidence.
Is there really much of an anti-immigrant narrative here?
The Trump administration has suspended the green card lottery program, using this murder as an excuse.
They are taking advantage of a situation. You'd think a false flag would definitely have someone who could be construed to not be a white immigrant.
I don't think it's a false flag but the online right has already decided the shooter isn't white.
If anyone has ever been confused by the concept of race being a cultural construct, here is an object lesson.
The killer was an immigrant (from Portugal).
Any crime by an immigrant or by a non-immigrant can be twisted into an anti-immigrant narrative by Trump. And this one has been.
Which non-immigrant crime was twisted into an anti-immigrant narrative?
Among others:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/how-a-fox-news-rep...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68353305.amp
sadly flock ended up being helpful here (according to the police per the article). also interesting that it was some random homeless guy who happened to be there that blew the whole thing wide open. despite all of the surveillance...
How can you not read this and just see it's a huge puff piece for Flock. As far as I can read from the first article and reports they were not pivotal in tracking down the killer. It was once again only someone else who knew that person and came forward, exactly the same as Tyler Robison case
"Phil Helsel Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said a person who had information about the suspect played a crucial role in the case."
The commentor you are replying to is likely in support of Flock.
lol why do you say that?
The police state in the article it was helpful in linking the crimes. What evidence do you have to contradict their testimony?
Was it helpful? The man committed two shootings and they caught him after he committed suicide. It didn't prevent a crime.
It connected the two incidents per license plate readings per the article. Why do you think it wasn’t?
My question is how many other license plates also would have been connected this way? What's the false positive rate?
Why is that relevant for this case?
If there's any claim that "flock found these two plates were seen in both areas!!111" then how many other plates were seen in both areas in the same timeframe? How much of this is throwing away results that disagree with the narrative?
Again, not sure how that’s relevant.
He may have only committed suicide once he knew they were closing in.
Who ever credibly claims that cameras prevent crime though?
> some random homeless guy
Was he homeless? I haven't seen that mentioned in the articles.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6386706790112
New York Post states it in a YouTube video titled 'All About Brown, MIT Shooting Suspect Claudio Neves Valente – who BARKED During Massacre'.
“This is a very advanced technology, and whatever nation masters it first is going to have an incredible advantage,” Loureiro says.
https://energy.mit.edu/news/funding-the-fusion-revolution/