It took five days for the authorities to find the Brown University shooter.
Late Thursday night, police identified Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente, a 48-year-old from Portugal, as the man who opened fire in the campus engineering building, killing two students, Ella Cook, 19, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, and injuring nine.
Valente, who dropped out of Brown in the early 2000s after two semesters as a physics graduate student, was found in a warehouse in Salem, New Hampshire, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Law enforcement believes he is also behind the Monday murder of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Today, we can all rest easier knowing that the killer has been found. But we must not ignore something vital: The response to the shooting was utterly abominable. It was a tale of confusion and missteps from start to finish, an institutional incompetence so great that an army of online social media accounts tried to do the work of the police themselves—and, for the most part, failed spectacularly.
