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Suspected Brown University gunman found dead

Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, was found dead on Thursday evening.

By contributor Kimberlee Kruesi and Alanna Durkin Richer and Eric Tucker, Associated Press
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Law enforcement officers are seen outside a storage facility where a suspect in the shooting at Brown University was found dead (Reba Saldanha/AP)

A man who is suspected of killing two and wounding several others at Brown University has been found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility where he had rented a unit, officials said.

Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, was found dead on Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Providence police chief Oscar Perez said at a news conference. Mr Perez said as far as investigators know, the suspect acted alone.

Investigators believe Neves Valente is responsible for both the shooting at Brown and the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor who was fatally shot in his Brookline home on Monday, US attorney for Massachusetts Leah B Foley said.

A man walks a dog close to a memorial near Brown University’s Barus and Holley building in Providence
A man walks a dog close to a memorial near Brown University’s Barus and Holley building in Providence (Lily Speredelozzi/The Sun Chronicle via AP)

Two people were killed and nine were wounded in the mass shooting on Saturday at Brown University.

The investigation shifted on Thursday when authorities said they were looking into a connection between the Brown mass shooting and an attack two days later near Boston that killed 47-year-old MIT professor Nuno FG Loureiro.

Brown University president Christina Paxson said Neves Valente was enrolled at Brown from the autumn of 2000 to the spring of 2001. He was admitted to the graduate school to study physics beginning in September 2000.

“He has no current affiliation with the university,” she said.

Neves Valente and Loureiro attended the same academic programme at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, US attorney for Massachusetts Leah B Foley said.

Prof Loureiro graduated from the physics programme at Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, in 2000, according to his MIT faculty page.

The same year, Neves Valente was let go from a position at the Lisbon university, according to an archive of a termination notice from the school’s then-president in February 2000.

Neves Valente had come to Brown on a student visa. He eventually obtained legal permanent residence status in September 2017, Ms Foley said. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017. His last known residence was in Miami.

After officials revealed the suspect’s identity, President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery programme that allowed Neves Valente to stay in the United States.

Brown University Shooting
A woman lights a candle at a memorial set up in front of the Barus and Holley engineering building at Brown University (Mark Stockwell/AP)

There are still “a lot of unknowns” in regard to motive, Rhode Island attorney general Peter Neronha said. “We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom,” he said.

The FBI previously said it knew of no links between the Rhode Island and Massachusetts shootings.

Police credited a person who had several encounters with Neves Valente for providing a crucial tip that led to the suspect.

After police shared security video of a person of interest, the witness — known only as “John” in a Providence police affidavit — recognised him and posted his suspicions on the social media forum Reddit. Reddit users urged him to tell the FBI, and John said he did.

John said he had encountered Neves Valente hours earlier in the toilet of the engineering building where the shooting occurred and noticed he was wearing inappropriate clothing for the weather, according to the affidavit.

He again bumped into Neves Valente a couple of blocks away and saw him suddenly turn away from a Nissan sedan when he saw John.

“When you do crack it, you crack it. And that person led us to the car, which led us to the name,” Mr Neronha said.

His tip pointed investigators to a Nissan Sentra with Florida plates. That enabled Providence police to tap into a network of more than 70 street cameras operated around the city by surveillance company Flock Safety. Those cameras track licence plates and other vehicle details.

After leaving Rhode Island, Providence officials said Neves Valente stuck a Maine licence plate over his rental car’s plate to help conceal his identity.

Investigators found footage of Neves Valente entering an apartment building near Prof Loureiro’s in a Boston suburb. About an hour later, Neves Valente was seen entering the Salem, New Hampshire, storage facility where he was found dead, Ms Foley said. He had with him a satchel and two firearms

Prof Loureiro, a 47-year-old physicist and fusion scientist, had joined MIT in 2016 and was named last year to lead the school’s Plasma Science and Fusion Centre, one of its largest laboratories. The scientist from Viseu, Portugal, had been working to explain the physics behind astronomical phenomena such as solar flares.

The two Brown students killed during a study session for final exams were 19-year-old sophomore Ella Cook and 18-year-old freshman MukhammadAziz Umurzokov.