Authorities have now confirmed a link between the suspect in the mass shooting at Brown University and the shocking murder of a prominent nuclear fusion professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Claudio Manuel Valente, the 48-year-old suspect in the Brown University mass shooting on Saturday that left two people dead, was discovered with a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, on Thursday night.
Police now believe Valente is also responsible for the Dec. 15 murder of Portuguese MIT professor Nuno Loureiro.
Loureiro, 47, was killed at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, two days after the Brown University shooting. Brookline is 45 miles from Providence, Rhode Island, where Brown is located.
The FBI had previously stated there was no evidence to establish a connection between the two crimes.
During a press conference on Thursday evening, Leah B. Foley, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, confirmed that Valente and Loureiro attended the same college in their native Portugal at the same time, but said their team is still investigating the motive for the MIT professor’s murder.
“The information that I know… is that there was no doubt that he was the intended target,” Foley said.
Foley said Valente and Loureiro attended the same academic program in Portugal between 1995 and 2000.
Officials were able to link the suspect to both crimes because of a vehicle that was rented in Boston, then driven to Rhode Island.
“The vehicle was seen outside of Brown, and there was security footage that showed a person who resembled him,” Foley said. “There were financial investigations that were going on in the background that linked him not only to that car, but also to the hotels that he had rented.”
She added, “There was security footage that captured him within a half mile of the professor’s residence in Brookline. And there is video footage of him entering an apartment building in the location of the professor’s apartment. He was seen about an hour later entering the storage unit, wearing the same clothes that he had been seen wearing right after the murder.”
Foley said Valente had no criminal record in the U.S.
During a Thursday press conference in Providence, Brown University president Christina Paxson said Valente attended the campus as a graduate student in physics between 2000 and 2001, and would have taken classes in the area where the shooting was carried out.
He took a leave of absence in April 2001 and formally withdrew from the school in July 2003.
Valente, a Portuguese national, was found with a satchel and two firearms. His last known address was Miami, Florida, but he reportedly flew to Providence in October.
“He took his own life tonight,” Providence, Rhode Island Police Chief Oscar Perez said in a press conference.
Students Ella Cook of Alabama, 19, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov of Uzbekistan, 18, died in the tragic Brown University shooting, while nine others were struck but survived.
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