Investigators turned on Friday to the search for a motive in the murders of two Brown University students and a physics professor in Massachusetts in separate but linked attacks, after the prime suspect was found dead from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The body of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national and formerly very briefly a student at Brown, was discovered in a New Hampshire storage facility on Thursday night after a five-day manhunt.
Authorities say he was responsible for last Saturday’s mass shooting at the university’s engineering building on campus in Providence, Rhode Island, in which two people were killed and nine others wounded.
The suspect then drove 50 miles to Brookline, Massachusetts, and shot dead the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Nuno FG Loureiro at his home on Monday night, the FBI said during a press conference that also revealed the existence of a tipster named “John”, who was key in leading investigators to Neves Valente.
Peter Neronha, attorney general of Rhode Island, said there were still “a lot of unknowns” regarding a motive. “We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom,” he said, referring to the university’s Barus & Holley engineering building where the Brown students Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov were killed.
Neves Valente had “no current affiliation with the university”, Brown’s president, Christina Paxson, said, but he was enrolled at Brown from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001 as a graduate student studying physics, before leaving.
At a later news conference on Thursday in Boston, Leah Foley, US attorney for Massachusetts, said Neves Valente and Loureiro attended the same academic program between 1995 and 2000 at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal’s premier engineering university.
Related: Tipster hailed for helping authorities identify suspect in Brown shooting
Loureiro, who was head of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, graduated from the physics program at the Lisbon facility in 2000, according to his biography. Neves Valente was terminated from a position at the university the same year, Foley said.
Further details of their connection came in an affidavit by special agent Bryce Ferrara of the FBI’s Boston field office violent crimes taskforce. The five-page document revealed that Neves Valente, who became a US permanent resident in 2017, and whose last known address was in Miami, rented a gray Nissan Sentra car with a Florida tag at a Boston car rental agency on 1 December.
Images of the vehicle were captured on numerous surveillance cameras near the Brown campus on various dates between 1 and 12 December, the affidavit states, and it was photographed again on Monday close to Loureiro’s home with a false Maine license plate attached.
“This was a highly dangerous individual capable of extreme violence,” Tom Greco, special agent in charge for the Boston division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), told the press conference.
Neves Valente’s body was found in a storage unit he rented in Salem, New Hampshire, with a bag and two firearms, as well as evidence “that matches exactly what we see at the scene here in Providence”, Neronha said.
The discovery ended a stuttering five-day search for the killer, which analysts say was hampered by a premature assertion by the FBI director, Kash Patel, that the Brown case was solved following the detention of “a person of interest” on Sunday.
That person was quickly cleared and released, leading some observers to call for Patel’s resignation, and forcing authorities to deny accusations that the episode had held up the investigation. The authorities then asked the public for their help.
Police in Providence said several “strange encounters” between Neves Valente and the tipster called John before the Brown shooting helped investigators to identify the suspect, a development Neronha said “blew this case wide open”.
According to authorities, John posted to Reddit that he recognized Neves Valente from a photograph released by the FBI, and urged detectives to look at “a gray Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental”. Until then authorities had not linked a vehicle to the shootings.
According to the Associated Press, John encountered Neves Valente in the bathroom of Brown’s engineering building hours before the attack, where John noted the suspect’s clothing was “inappropriate and inadequate for the weather”.
John also encountered Neves Valente outside, close to the building, where he watched Neves Valente “suddenly” turn from the Nissan, the news agency reported. A “game of cat and mouse” ensued, according to John’s testimony, in which the two would encounter each other and Neves Valente would run away.
Brett Smiley, mayor of Providence, said on Friday, in an interview with CNN, that “everybody in Providence owes this individual a debt of gratitude”.
“There was a Reddit tip that had to do with the vehicle that turned out to be a central part of this investigation,” Smiley said.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, announced on Thursday that the Trump administration was suspending the green card lottery program that allowed Neves Valente, who entered the US in 2000 on a student visa, to become a permanent resident 16 years later.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
