Brown University and MIT shooting suspect found dead; identified as a former student

The suspect in last weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University, which killed two students and injured nine others, was found dead Thursday — and authorities said he is the same man who shot an MIT professor two days after the Rhode Island campus shooting.

At a news conference Thursday, authorities identified the suspect as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown student who attended the school about 25 years ago.

Officials said he committed suicide. His body was discovered in a New Hampshire warehouse after an intense, multi-state manhunt that had lasted for days.

“Tonight, our neighbors in Providence can finally breathe a little easier,” Mayor Brett Smiley told reporters at a news conference Thursday evening.

Officials said there is no evidence Valente was working with anyone else. They detail his movements leading up to and after the shooting, including the steps he took to hide himself from authorities.

Officials have not yet provided a motive for the back-to-back shootings that kept residents in parts of New England on edge for days.

Former PhD student who spent time in technical construction

Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, said Neves Valente enrolled as a PhD student in Brown’s physics program in 2000 and participated for less than a year before going on leave and then withdrawing. She said it was believed that he spent a lot of time in the Barus as a physics student & Holley engineering building that was the target of Saturday’s shooting.

Valente, who entered the U.S. on a student visa in 2000, was granted legal residency in April 2017, authorities said.

He currently had no ties to the school, officials said.

How two mysterious crimes were connected

Authorities in Massachusetts have confirmed that Valente is also the suspected shooter in the death of MIT professor Nuno FG Loureiro in Brookline, who was fatally shot in the foyer of his building in Brookline, Massachusetts on Monday evening.

Both men were residents of Portugal, and U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley told reporters at a news conference late Thursday evening that Valente and Loureiro are believed to have attended the same academic program in Portugal in the 1990s.

Only in the past few days was the “connection made” between the two puzzling crimes, Foley told reporters as authorities.

Valente’s last known address was in Miami, but he had rented a hotel room in Boston in late November, Foley said. On Dec. 1, he rented a gray Nissan Sentra, which was later observed on campus intermittently over the 12 days leading up to the shooting, she said.

How investigators tracked down the suspect

Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said local police helped track Valente, thanks in part to surveillance video and a detailed tip about a vehicle driven by a person who had noticed strange behavior from the suspect.

“I’m dead serious. Police need to investigate a gray Nissan with Florida license plates, possibly a rental car,” the tipster told police, according to a complaint from Rhode Island authorities. “That was the car he was driving.”

The tip and surveillance video, along with the use of license plate reader technology, led investigators to a car rental company in Massachusetts. There, police obtained a copy of the lease agreement with the suspect’s name, as well as a video of the suspect that matched videos of the person of interest seen on the Brown University campus the day of the shooting.

What happened at the New Hampshire storage facility

Authorities said the discovery eventually led them to a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, on the border with Massachusetts, where Valente had rented a unit. Foley, the U.S. attorney, said investigators believe Valente fled to the storage facility shortly after the shooting of the MIT professor Monday night.

Thursday evening, investigators approached the storage facility and obtained a search warrant, which FBI SWAT teams executed shortly before 9 p.m.

Authorities said Valente’s body was found in a storage room next to the storage unit he had rented. He was found with a bag containing two firearms.

The two Brown students who were killed were identified as 19-year-old Ella Cook and 18-year-old MukhammadAziz Umurzokov. They were both fatally shot by gunfire when the gunman burst into the first-floor room where a review session for an economics course was taking place.

The building was unlocked because exams were being held in the building at the time of the shooting, the university president said.

Authorities also said Thursday that someone confronted the gunman in a bathroom in the building and said he felt like he didn’t belong there.