BOSTON: A frantic search for the suspect in last weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University ended Thursday at a New Hampshire storage facility where authorities discovered the man dead inside and then revealed he also was suspected of killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said Col. Oscar Perez, the Providence police chief.
Investigators believe he is responsible for fatally shooting two students and wounding nine other people in a Brown University lecture hall last Saturday, then killing Portuguese MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro two days later at his Brookline home, nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Providence. Perez said as far as investigators know, Neves Valente acted alone.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Neves Valente was enrolled there as a graduate student studying physics from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001.
“He has no current affiliation with the university,” she said.
Neves Valente and Loureiro previously attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, US attorney for Massachusetts Leah B. Foley said. Loureiro graduated from the physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, in 2000, according to his MIT faculty page. The same year, Neves Valente was let go from a position at the Lisbon university, according to an archive of a termination notice from the school’s then-president in February 2000.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on a student visa. He eventually obtained legal permanent residence status in September 2017, Foley said. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017. His last known residence was in Miami.
After officials revealed the suspect’s identity, President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program that allowed Neves Valente to stay in the United States.
There are still “a lot of unknowns” in regard to motive, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said. “We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom,” he said.
How the investigation has unfolded
Police credited a person who had several encounters with Neves Valente as providing the crucial tip that led to the shooter.
“When you do crack it, you crack it. And that person led us to the car, which led us to the name,” Neronha said.
After police posted images of a person of interest, the witness recognized him and posted his suspicions on the social media forum Reddit.
But it took days before police say they interviewed him and only after publicizing a video where Neves Valente appeared to run away from the other man. The Reddit commenter didn’t respond to questions from The Associated Press earlier week but returned to the forum on Wednesday night to say that he was just interviewed by investigators.
His tip gave investigators a key detail: a Nissan sedan with Florida plates. That enabled Providence police officers to tap into a network of more than 70 street cameras operated around the city by surveillance company Flock Safety. Those cameras track license plates and other vehicle details.
After leaving Rhode Island, Providence officials said Neves Valente stuck a Maine license plate over the rental car’s plate to help conceal his identity.
Video footage showed Neves Valente entering an apartment building near Loureiro’s in a Boston suburb. About an hour later, Neves Valente was seen entering the Salem, New Hampshire, storage facility where he was found dead, Foley said. He had with him a satchel and two firearms, Neronha said.
Loureiro joined MIT in 2016 and was named last year to lead the school’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, one of its largest laboratories. He had been working to explain the physics behind astronomical phenomena such as solar flares.
The FBI previously said it knew of no links between the two shootings.
Although Brown officials say there are 1,200 cameras on campus, the attack happened in an older part of the engineering building that has few, if any, cameras. And investigators believe the shooter entered and left through a door that faces a residential street bordering campus, which might explain why the cameras Brown does have didn’t capture footage of the person.
What happened in past investigations?
In such targeted and highly public attacks, the shooters typically kill themselves or are killed or arrested by police, said Katherine Schweit, a retired FBI agent and expert on mass shootings. When they do get away, searches can take time.
In the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, it took investigators four days to catch up to the two brothers who carried it out. In a 2023 case, Army reservist Robert Card was found dead of an apparent suicide two days after he killed 18 people and wounded 13 others in Lewiston, Maine.
The man accused of killing conservative political figure Charlie Kirk in September turned himself in about a day and a half after the attack on Utah Valley University’s campus. And Luigi Mangione, who has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan last year, was arrested five days later at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania.