A man suspected in the shooting at Brown Universitythis weekend that killed two people and injured nine had committed suicide Thursday night, authorities said.
The man was discovered dead at a storage facility on Thursday evening, the AP reported, citing a law enforcement source. The suspect is also believed to have killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor at his Boston-area home, the official said.
“He took his own life tonight,” Oscar Perez, chief of the Providence, Rhode Island police department, said at a press conference.
Perez identified the man as Claudio Nevis Valenti, a 48-year-old Brown student.
The AP’s report comes hours after dozens of law enforcement agents convened on a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire. Shortly before 8pm, journalist Eli Sherman reported: “Multiple law enforcement officials carrying weapons and wearing full tactical gear” entered the storage facility.
The manhunt for the shooter had started afresh on Monday morning after the state’s attorney general announced that a person of interest detained on Sunday had been released, a development that Providence mayor Brett Smiley conceded was “likely to cause fresh anxiety for our community”.
Smiley told CNN that while the release of the original person of interest had been a setback, “that didn’t mean that the other pieces of the investigation were stopped or in any way paused”.
The FBI director, Kash Patel, faced criticism on Monday for rushing to social media to celebrate the bureau’s work, only for the person arrested to be freed hours later.
The two students killed were identified by family as Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, an Uzbek national in his first year at Brown. Cook was vice-president of Brown’s College Republicans of America chapter; Umurzokov dreamed of becoming a neurosurgeon.
Officials are expected to convene a press conference shortly to give further details of the death of the suspect.
More details soon …
