An autopsy report on the suspect in the mass shooting at Brown University and the killing of an MIT professor in Massachusetts has shown that he died from by suicide two days before he was found in a storage locker on Thursday.
The New Hampshire attorney general’s report estimates that Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national who had been living in the US, died on 16 December, the same day that his fellow countryman, MIT nuclear physics professor Nuno Loureiro died at a hospital in Massachusetts.
Three days earlier, authorities have said, Neves Valente was responsible for a shooting in Rhode Island that claimed the lives of two students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, and injured nine others in Brown university’s Barus & Holley engineering building.
The two crimes were not immediately linked, but investigators putting together a timeline of Neves Valente’s movements across three states have said it was a Reddit post by a homeless former Brown student name “John” that helped them to identify Neves Valente as a person of interest.
“That person led us to the car, which led us to the name, which led us to the photographs, which matched the clothing,” said Rhode Island’s attorney general, Peter Neronha. “He was found dead with a satchel with two firearms and evidence in the car that matches exactly what we see at the scene here in Providence.”
The tipoff in Rhode Island that a suspicious man was seen driving away from the university in a gray Nissan with Florida plates matched a Massachusetts report that a similar car was seen in the vicinity of Loureiro’s shooting, but with Maine plates.
The Florida plates was traced to a Boston car rental office, where investigators learned the identity of the suspect. The vehicle was later found outside a storage facility in Salem, Massachusetts, and, along with it, the body of Neves Valente.
Investigators have since confirmed that Neves Valente had been a doctoral student at Brown and previously studied with Loureiro and attended the same academic program between 1995 and 2000 at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal’s premier engineering university.
A motive for the killings has not been formally established by authorities. A report from Boston’s WCVB5 on Saturday quoted a former classmate of Neves Valente that the suspect was “bored” and “hated” his time at Brown.
Scott Watson, now a professor at Syracuse university, told the outlet that Neves Valente complained that the classes at Brown were too easy. “He was bored because he knew more than any of us, he already should’ve had a PhD,” Watson said. “He hated Brown and he hated Providence.”
Portugal’s foreign minister, Paulo Rangel, said on Friday that his government was taken aback by revelations that a Portuguese man was the suspect in the mass shooting at Brown and the killing of Loureiro, according to the Associated Press. He said Portugal has provided “very broad cooperation” and told the national news agency Lusa that “the investigation is far from over”.
In the wake of the killings, the Trump administration has ordered the suspension of the green card lottery program that it claimed Neves Valente had used to enter the US in 2000. “This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said on X.
But Oscar Perez, the police chief in Providence, Rhode Island, said Valente entered the US on a student visa and became a permanent resident in 2017.
