The gunman who killed two students and injured nine others in a shooting at Brown University last weekend and an MIT professor at his home outside of Boston earlier this week was found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire on Thursday, authorities said.
Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, died of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at the facility in Salem, N.H., according to police.
The discovery of his body ended a six-day manhunt that began Saturday in Providence, R.I., where officials say Neves Valente opened fire inside an engineering building on the Brown University campus.
“Nothing can really fully bring closure to the lives that have been shattered over the past week,” Brown University president Christina Paxson said at a news conference on Thursday night. “But this may allow our community to move forward.”
Images of the shooter at Brown University, identified by authorities as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, are displayed during a press conference on Dec. 18. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
Investigators believe Neves Valente is also responsible for the killing of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro in Brookline, Mass., on Monday night. Loureiro was the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
Initially, authorities said they were not aware of any connections between the two cases.
What we know and don’t know about the gunman
He attended Brown as a graduate student
Neves Valente, a Portuguese national, was enrolled at Brown on a student visa from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001, Paxton said. He was admitted to the graduate school to study physics beginning in September 2000 but had no current affiliation with the university, she said.
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What we don’t know: There is no indication that Neves Valente knew any of his victims, and what led him to target the school remains unclear. “We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said.
He studied at the same school as the MIT professor in Portugal
Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, said that Neves Valente and Loureiro attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000. Loureiro graduated from the physics program at Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico in 2000, according to his MIT bio.
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What we don’t know: Foley said she believes Neves Valente knew Loureiro. But she did not elaborate on the nature of their relationship.
He became a legal U.S. resident in 2017
Neves Valente obtained legal permanent residence status in September 2017, Foley said. His last known address was in Miami.
President Trump on Thursday suspended the student visa program that allowed Neves Valente to enter the United States. “This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem wrote in a post on X.
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What we don’t know: Foley said that Neves Valente returned to New England in November, but it’s unclear what he was doing in the years since he left Brown. Authorities said that he has no known criminal record.
In the days following the shooting at Brown, police in Providence released photos and videos of a “person of interest” seen in surveillance footage wearing dark clothing, a black mask and hat, who authorities said had been “casing the area.”
They also released photos of a person who was “in proximity of the person of interest” and asked for the public’s help in identifying them.
An online tip posted on the message board Reddit played a key role in helping authorities track down Neves Valente, according to an affidavit released Thursday night.
“I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental,” the poster, who is only identified as John in the affidavit, wrote.
John then approached the police in person to tell them about multiple encounters he had had with someone he believed to be the suspect, providing them with information that Rhode Island’s attorney general said “blew this case right open.”
The new leads, plus an additional tip from a Brown faculty member, helped authorities identify a rental car that they would later learn was rented by Neves Valente. In surveillance video from the rental car office, Neves Valente was seen wearing “the exact same outfit” as the Brown shooting suspect, according to the affidavit.
During a news conference on Tuesday evening, Providence Chief of Police Oscar Perez Jr. said the videos show the individual “casing the area” in a residential neighborhood near Brown just hours before the shooting took place on Saturday.
“That’s what criminals do prior to committing a crime,” Perez said. He advised the public to pay attention to any body movements, gait or posture of the person in the video. The suspect, according to the FBI, was “described as a male, approximately 5’8” with a stocky build.”
Police released a map on Wednesday of the area where the person was in the hours leading up to Saturday’s shooting.
