Federal prosecutors in Massachusetts said Thursday that they had connected the killings of two Brown University students and an M.I.T. professor to a man who was found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, went to a storage facility in Salem, N.H., shortly after he shot Nuno F.G. Loureiro, the M.I.T. professor who was found dead in his home in Brookline, Mass., on Tuesday, the authorities said. Three days earlier, Mr. Neves Valente had opened fire in an auditorium at Brown University in Providence, R.I., killing two students.
He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, the authorities said Thursday evening, after a search of the storage facility ended a dayslong manhunt.
The suspect may have known one of the victims.
Mr. Neves Valente, a Portuguese national, entered the United States on a student visa in 2000 and became a permanent resident in 2017, according to the Providence police.
Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, said she believed that Mr. Neves Valente knew Dr. Loureiro from their time in the same academic program in Portugal from 1995 to 2000. Dr. Loureiro earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, according to his M.I.T. profile.
Mr. Neves Valente’s motive for the shooting at Brown University remained unclear, Peter F. Neronha, Rhode Island’s attorney general, said on Thursday. Mr. Neves Valente was briefly enrolled in a graduate physics program at Brown from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001, according to Christina Paxson, the university’s president.
The authorities said there was no indication that Mr. Neves Valente knew Ella Cook or MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, the two Brown students who were killed.
The suspect was identified through a tip on Reddit.
The authorities in Rhode Island said they received information from an anonymous source about a Reddit post in which a user claimed to have seen the suspect.
“I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental,” the post said, according to an affidavit filed by the Providence police.
The tip matched the description of a suspicious vehicle with Florida license plates that a faculty member at Brown had reported seeing. Investigators traced the car, a Nissan Sentra, to a rental company in Boston and identified the renteras Claudio Manuel Neves Valente.
Ms. Foley said Mr. Neves Valente had switched the vehicle’s Florida license plate with an unregistered plate from Maine. He also used multiple SIM cards and a Google phone, which prevents location tracking, to conceal his movements, she said.
Francesca Regalado is a Times reporter covering breaking news.
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