A man suspected in the fatal shooting at Brown University and killing days later of a professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a New Hampshire storage facility, authorities announced Thursday evening.
The alleged shooter, 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, was a physics graduate student at Brown more than two decades ago. A legal permanent U.S. resident from Portugal, Valente was living in Miami before he came to Boston last month, authorities said.
They added that he appears to have acted alone and that the motive for the killings remains unknown.
On Saturday, law enforcement officials said, Valente opened fire in a lecture hall at Brown during an economics study session, killing two and wounding nine.
Two days later, he shot and killed MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, authorities said. Loureiro, 47, a professor of nuclear science and engineering, and of physics, was found shot at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, about 45 miles north of Brown.
Valente and Loureiro are believed to have known each other and attended the same academic program between 1995 and 2000 at a university in Portugal, said Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, at a news conference Thursday.
She declined to elaborate on the nature of their connection or say whether the two men had communicated recently, except to say that investigators believe Valente targeted Loureiro but had no known ties to any of the victims at Brown.
The Instituto Superior Técnico, a university in Portugal, confirmed Friday that Valente and Loureiro both enrolled in its physical and technological engineering program in 1995, graduating in 2000.
Nuno Morais, 48, went to school with Loureiro and Valente for five years in Portugal and described both men as “nice and friendly people.” Valente was “more assertive, more engaged, more vocal,” he said, while Loureiro “was more discreet, both in class and in his academic life outside of class.”
“Cláudio was a great colleague, one of the best students in the class,” Morais said. “He was very competitive, he liked having very high grades, and he did get very good grades, but he always shared the materials with his colleagues. I always had an excellent relationship with him.”
When Morais was in school with Valente, he said the suspected shooter showed no signs of mental health problems.
Thursday’s discovery ended a five-day search that early on appeared to stump investigators and rattled communities from Providence, Rhode Island, to Boston. Federal, state and local law enforcement spent almost a week scouring the region for the gunman, and the prolonged search sent thousands of frightened students home and cast a pall over Providence, a tight-knit city where gun violence is rare.
The key breakthrough in the case came Wednesday, said Peter Neronha, Rhode Island’s attorney general, when a witness came forward and described an unusual encounter with Valente before the shooting at Brown.
“He blew this case right open,” Neronha said.
The witness was identified in an arrest warrant affidavit made public Thursday evening as “John.” Investigators said John noticed Valente in a bathroom of an on-campus building roughly two hours before the shooting Saturday.
John described Valente as suspicious, noting his clothing seemed “flimsy” and inappropriate for the cold weather, the affidavit states.
John followed Valente from the building, watched him approach a gray Nissan Sentra with Florida plates parked nearby, and then quickly walk away from the car once he noticed he was being watched.
John would later tell police he followed Valente, who appeared to be lingering on the block and attempting to return to the car while avoiding his attention.
Eventually, authorities said, John confronted Valente. “I don’t know you from nobody,” Valente responded, according to the affidavit. “Why are you harassing me?”
John posted about the encounter on Reddit after the shooting, suggesting police needed to look for the suspicious man’s car.
“That person led us to the car, which led us to the name, which led us to the photographs of the person renting the car,” Neronha told reporters Thursday night.
The car’s rental agreement, Neronha added, led to the alleged shooter’s identity.
Authorities said they did not know why Valente — who did not appear to have any criminal record in the United States — targeted Brown. Valente had started studying for a master’s degree in physics there in the fall of 2000 but took a leave of absence in the spring of 2001 and formally withdrew in July 2003 without receiving a degree and had no affiliation with the university since, said Brown President Christina H. Paxson.
Many of his physics classes would have been at Barus and Holley, the building where the shooting unfolded, according to Paxson, who added that Valente was likely to have “spent a great deal of time” there while he was a student.
Using security footage, investigators were able to reconstruct Valente’s trail across New England, including both at Brown and near Loureiro’s home.
Foley said that Valente had arrived in New England in November and later rented a hotel room in Boston, the storage facility in New Hampshire at which he was found dead, and the Nissan Sentra with a Florida license plate John described to authorities.
Valente picked up the car in Boston on Dec. 1, authorities said, and drove it that same day to Rhode Island. Over the next two weeks, surveillance cameras surrounding Brown’s campus photographed the car at least 14 times, according to the arrest affidavit in his case.
Footage from the day of the shooting showed Valente apparently casing the area for hours before he entered the university building where a final exam study session was taking place.
Witnesses told The Washington Post that a man dressed in black, his face covered, burst into a lecture hall around 4 p.m. Saturday. He yelled something unintelligible and opened fire.
The two students killed were Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama who was concentrating in mathematics-economics and French, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a freshman from Virginia who had hoped to become a brain surgeon.
Valente, meanwhile, slipped out of the building and fled the state. Within a day of the shooting, authorities said, he had returned to the Boston area and on Monday fatally shot Loureiro.
The professor, who joined MIT in 2016, previously worked as a researcher at Instituto Superior Técnico’s Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion in Lisbon.
Investigators were able to pinpoint the car Valente had rented near Loureiro’s apartment around the time of the slaying. By that point, he had swapped its Florida license plate for an unregistered plate from Maine, they said.
That was just one of the tactics, Foley said Thursday, that Valente used to elude law enforcement. Throughout his time on the run, he used a phone that obfuscated his location and credit cards that were not issued in his name, she said.
Investigators eventually traced the car to the Extra Space Storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, Thursday evening. A large law enforcement presence amassed outside the unit as news helicopters hovered overhead and officers with long guns appeared prepared for a confrontation.
Once authorities breached the unit, they found Valente dead. Beside him were two guns and a satchel he had previously been filmed carrying, officials said.
Foley told reporters that investigators believe Valente entered the unit shortly after Loureiro’s slaying and had been inside the unit for days.
At the middle-class North Miami-Dade County neighborhood listed as Valente’s address, residents said early Friday that they did not know him or had seen him only fleetingly. A neighbor across the street, Jay Torres, when shown photos of Valente, said he saw the man standing outside the home about a month ago. “Just standing out in front” but otherwise unremarkable, Torres said.
Late Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem said that at President Donald Trump’s direction, she had ordered U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to immediately pause a green-card lottery program through which Valente gained legal entry to the country in 2017. The program allows about 50,000 people a year from low-immigration countries to apply to come to the U.S.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem said in a statement on social media.
The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about why Noem believed he should not have been admitted, which happened during Trump’s first term.
Trump unsuccessfully urged Congress to terminate the visa lottery in 2017 after another recipient, Sayfullo Saipov of Uzbekistan, carried out an Islamic State-inspired attack in Lower Manhattan that left eight people dead and 18 others injured when he drove a truck down a bike path. Saipov was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
In most mass shootings in the U.S., suspects are either killed or captured quickly, making Valente’s days on the run stand out.
Each day during the manhunt, local news conferences became more contentious as police provided bare-bones updates and asked for the public’s help identifying blurred images of a person of interest.
Anxiety grew after police briefly detained a person of interest Sunday before releasing him without charges, saying their evidence showed he was not the shooter.
As they announced their breakthrough in the case Thursday, authorities said it was finally time to put that frustration and fear to rest.
“We got him,” said Ted Docks, the FBI’s special agent in charge in Boston.
Daniel Wu, Praveena Somasundaram, Emily Davies, Susan Svrluga, María Luisa Paúl, Todd Wallack, Catarina Fernandes Martins and Victoria Bisset contributed to this report.
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