The suspect in the mass shooting at Brown University and the murder of an MIT professor has been found dead. The discovery ends a six-day manhunt after the shooting at Brown left two people dead last Saturday.
Providence police chief Col. Oscar Perez says 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente, a native of Portugal, shot himself in a New Hampshire storage unit.
Investigators believe the suspect is responsible for fatally shooting two students and wounding nine other people in a Brown lecture hall last Saturday, then killing MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro two days later at his home in the Boston suburbs, nearly 50 miles from Providence.
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Surveillance video and a tip from a person on campus led to Neves Valente as a suspect. He’s a former graduate student of Brown who left after a year in the physics program from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001.
Authorities connected him to the murder of Loureiro at his home near Boston on Monday because the two men studied in the same program at a prestigious engineering university in Lisbon, Portugal, in the late 90s.
While Loureiro graduated from that physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico in 2000, that same year, Neves Valente was let go from the university.
Neves Valente then came to Brown on a student visa and eventually obtained legal permanent U.S. resident status in September 2017, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah B. Foley said. It wasn’t immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from Brown in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017. His last known residence was in Miami.
Perez said as far as investigators know, Neves Valente acted alone. Police have not released a motive in the shootings.
A witness named “John” helped solve the case. He said he had encountered Neves Valente about two hours before the attack in a bathroom in the Brown University engineering building, where the shooting occurred. After the shooting, he reported the suspect because he had noticed the man was wearing inappropriate clothing for the weather.
Also, before the attack, he had once again bumped into Neves Valente a couple of blocks away and saw him suddenly turn away. That encounter involved a Nissan Sentra with Florida plates, which the witness also reported to authorities.
After officials revealed the suspect’s identity, President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program that allowed Neves Valente to stay in the U.S.
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