Programming note: please join me later tonight at SteynOnline for the fourth of this season's Christmas Tales for Our Time.
~The Brown University shooter has been found dead by his own hand in a storage locker in southern New Hampshire. The entire officialdom of Providence, Rhode Island celebrated by throwing "the most worthless, uninformative, cover-your-ass press conference I have ever seen in my entire life".
You'll be glad to hear that the DEI Mayor of Providence has declared "we believe that you remain safe in our community." He said this at 11pm last Sunday, but his statement was technically true because at that point the shooter was driving out of "our community" up to someone else's community to kill an MIT professor, who would assuredly be alive today had not everybody in Providence bungled everything that could be bungled. The storage-locker guy and the Boston guy are both Portuguese nationals of the same age who are believed by the FBI to have attended the same university in Lisbon at the end of the last century. What that means, who knows? A random mass-shooting as prelude to something more personal and targeted? As is now traditional, I doubt we shall ever know, but it has faint echoes of our recent serialisation of The Murder on the Links.
However, we do know how the forty-seven genius law-enforcement agencies "cracked the case". An Internet user saw this post on Reddit, and brought it to the attention of one of the forty-seven agencies, who shortly thereafter swung into what passes for action. Here's what the Redditor wrote:
I'm being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. That was the car he was driving. It was parked in front of the little shack behind the Rhode Island Historical Society on the Cooke St side. I know because he used his key fob to open the car, approached it and then something prompted him to back away. When he backed away he relocked the car. I found that odd so when he circled the block I approached the car and that is when I saw the Florida plates. He was parked in the section between the gate of the RIHS and the corner of Cooke and George St.
That's it. That's the entire "investigation". "He blew this case right open. He blew it open," cooed the Rhode Island Attorney-General, Peter Neronha. "That person led us to the car, which led us to the name, which led us to the photographs of that individual renting the car, which matched the clothing of our shooter here in Providence, that matched the satchel which we see here in Providence."
Great. His name is "John", and he had multiple interactions with the killer on the day of the shooting - both in the bathroom of the building two hours beforehand and by the car to which the killer kept circling back to see if "John" had ended his apparent stakeout of the vehicle. He spoke to the man long enough to determine that he had an "Hispanic" accent. In fact, Portuguese. But close enough. Or closer than the forty-seven kick-ass agencies.
But here's the thing: "John" only wrote his post on Reddit because nobody on the scene was interested in what he'd seen that day. "John" is apparently a homeless man who lives in the basement below the scene of the shooting.
Come again? Brown University lets the homeless live in its faculty buildings? You might want to bear that in mind if you're thinking of taking on six-figure debt to be gunned down at the Ivy League.
Oh, wait, no, relax: "John" is not any old homeless man but a graduate of Brown. They're not all working as baristas. So it's some grandfathered-in alumni legacy racket.
Which brings us to the other thing: He was generally known to be living there. So, on Saturday or at the very latest Sunday, why did no-one from the forty-seven kick-ass agencies seek to interview him? His would surely have been a unique perspective: neither teacher nor pupil, but someone who knows the building after-hours and observes the comings and goings. One expects the three-mil-a-year DEI president's "campus security" to totally suck, but how can you call in the FBI and then the elite best-of-the-best G-men not be aware that there's a guy living in the basement under the scene of the crime who had multiple interactions with the perp?
As I have had cause to remark a thousand times, nothing works anymore. When I observe that of the UK, English readers get mildly peeved. When I observe it of the Fifth Republic, French readers start gabbling and waving their Gauloise-stained hands around so animatedly their strings of onions fall from their shoulders. And, when I observe it of the United States, American readers get particularly chippy. But I'm an equal-opportunity civilisational doom-monger: we're all going over the falls, and arguing that the canoe of the Euro-pussies or the tight-assed Brits is a foot-and-a-half ahead isn't really much consolation. Police-wise, the Aussie constabulary bollocksed Bondi Beach and the forty-seven Yank agencies bollocksed Brown and MIT.
The question is how much bollocksing any nation can take. On the evidence of the last week, the leadership class of Brown University, the town of Providence and the state of Rhode Island are all way over-promoted. The boob of a municipal police chief is addressed as "colonel", so he ranks just a smidgeonette below Admiral Rachel Levine. I noted re this viral essay that the author is mainly talking about peripheral fields such as sitcom writers' rooms and newspaper op-ed pages. We now know that it extends also to law-enforcement and Ivy League administrations. Has it also advanced to airline pilots and emergency-room surgeons?
Exit question: the twin-state killer was admitted to the US on a "student visa". That presumably ended when he formally withdrew from Brown in 2003. Fourteen years later, he obtained a green card under the "diversity lottery":
The Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country.
In 2017, President Trump...
— Secretary Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem) December 19, 2025
Obviously, any such thing as a "diversity lottery" is an absurd and self-mutilating public policy. But was he in America for that decade-and-a-half between 2003 and 2017? In a country on supposed "orange alert"?
It's all bollocks. But bollocks that will get you and your entire civilisation killed. I mourn the death of tragic, doomed Ella Cook, even as I know she will be erased by the next Ella Cook, in however many weeks or days.
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