A frantic seek for the suspect in last weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University ended at a Latest Hampshire storage facility where authorities discovered the person dead inside after which revealed he also was suspected of killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, was found dead Thursday night from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said Col. Oscar Perez, the Windfall police chief.
Investigators imagine he’s accountable 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 within the Boston suburbs, nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Windfall. Perez said so far as investigators know, Neves Valente acted alone.
Portugal’s top diplomat said Friday that the federal government was stunned by revelations that a Portuguese man is the important suspect within the mass shooting at Brown and the killing of an MIT professor who was of the identical nationality. Police said they were contacted by U.S. authorities Thursday once Neves Valente was named.
Foreign Minister Paulo Rangel said Portugal has provided “very broad cooperation” within the case. He said in comments to the national news agency Lusa that “the investigation is much from over.”
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Neves Valente was enrolled there as a graduate student studying physics from the autumn of 2000 to the spring of 2001.
“He has no current affiliation with the university,” she said.
Neves Valente and Loureiro previously attended the identical academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, U.S. attorney for Massachusetts Leah B. Foley said. Loureiro graduated from the physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, in 2000, in line with his MIT faculty page. The identical 12 months, Neves Valente was let go from a position on the Lisbon university, in line with an archive of a termination notice from the college’s then-president in February 2000.
Neves Valente, who was born in Torres Novas, Portugal, about 75 miles (121 kilometers) north of Lisbon, had come to Brown on a student visa. He eventually obtained legal everlasting residence status in September 2017, Foley said. It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the college in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017. His last known residence was in Miami.
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After officials revealed the suspect’s identity, President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program that allowed Neves Valente to remain in the US.
There are still “plenty 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.
Tip helps investigators connect the dots
The FBI previously said it knew of no links between the Rhode Island and Massachusetts shootings.
Police credited a one that had several encounters with Neves Valente for providing an important tip that led authorities to him.
After police shared security video of an individual of interest, the witness — known only as “John” in a Windfall police affidavit — recognized him and posted his suspicions on the social media forum Reddit. Reddit users urged him to inform the FBI, and John said he did.
John said he had encountered Neves Valente hours earlier in the toilet of the engineering constructing where the shooting occurred and noticed he was wearing inappropriate clothing for the weather, in line with the affidavit. He again bumped into Neves Valente a pair blocks away and saw him suddenly turn away from a Nissan sedan when he saw John.
“While you do crack it, you crack it. And that person led us to the automobile, which led us to the name,” Neronha said.
His tip pointed investigators to a Nissan Sentra with Florida plates. That enabled Windfall police to tap right into a network of greater than 70 street cameras operated around town by surveillance company Flock Safety. Those cameras track license plates and other vehicle details.
After leaving Rhode Island, Windfall officials said Neves Valente stuck a Maine license plate over his rental automobile’s plate to assist conceal his identity.
Investigators found footage of Neves Valente entering an apartment constructing near Loureiro’s in a Boston suburb. About an hour later, Neves Valente was seen entering the Salem, Latest Hampshire, storage facility where he was found dead, Foley said. He had with him a satchel and two firearms, Neronha said.
Victims include renowned physicist, political organizer and aspiring doctor
Loureiro, a 47-year-old physicist and fusion scientist, had joined MIT in 2016 and was named last 12 months to steer the college’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, one in all its largest laboratories. The scientist from Viseu, Portugal, had been working to elucidate the physics behind astronomical phenomena akin to solar flares.
In Lisbon, he was remembered as a highly regarded researcher and instructor for “all of the contributions he gave and what he could still have given, all of the equations left unwritten,” said Professor Bruno Gonçalves, head of the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion at Instituto Superior Tecnico.
Gonçalves added, “It’s difficult to assume in what context someone would need to harm someone that works on this field.”
The 2 Brown students killed during a study session for final exams were 19-year-old sophomore Ella Cook and 18-year-old freshman MukhammadAziz Umurzokov. Cook was energetic in her Alabama church and served as vp of the Brown College Republicans.
Umurzokov’s family immigrated to the U.S. from Uzbekistan when he was a baby, and he aspired to be a physician.
As for the wounded, three had been discharged and 6 were in stable condition Thursday, officials said.
Although Brown officials say there are 1,200 cameras on campus, the attack happened in an older a part of the engineering constructing that has few, if any, cameras. And investigators imagine the shooter entered and left through a door that faces a residential street bordering campus, which could explain why the cameras Brown does have didn’t capture footage of the person.