The man police believe killed two people and wounded nine others at Brown University before killing an MIT professor at his home over the weekend was found dead by suicide in New Hampshire on Thursday night, authorities said.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, the person of interest, took his own life less than a week after the two shootings and was found dead in a storage facility with two firearms and evidence in his car that “matches exactly what we see” on scene in Providence, authorities said during a briefing on Thursday.
Valente was enrolled as a Brown student over 20 years ago and is a Portuguese national.
Valente has been the “focus” of law enforcement’s investigation in the Brown shooting “from the beginning,” Providence’s Police Chief, Colonel Oscar Perez said during the briefing. First, a suspicious video provided officers with a description of a vehicle, which was corroborated by a tip sent in to the police department, Perez said. Police tracked the car to a rental service in Massachusetts, from which they pulled footage of the suspicious individual and a copy of Valente’s rental records that included his full name.
Fusion-energy physicist and MIT professor Nuno F. Gomes Loureiro, 47, was shot and killed in his home on Monday evening. It is believed that Valente and Loureiro attended the same school in Lisbon, authorities confirmed Thursday, and law enforcement believes Valente is responsible for Loureiro’s death as well, U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah B. Foley said.
Valente was enrolled at Brown as a physics Ph.D. student from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001, Brown University president Christina Paxson said. Valente exclusively took physics classes, the majority of which have always been held in the Barus and Holley Building, the lecture hall the shooter attacked. He had no affiliation with the school at the time of the shooting.
Investigators were able to link Valente to the two cases when they recovered surveillance video of him within a half-mile of the professor’s home. Officers also identified the vehicle that Valente rented and drove from Boston to Brown and then back to Boston, Foley said — MIT and Brown are less than 60 miles away from each other.
Although the FBI special agent in charge of Boston’s office Ted Docks said on Tuesday that authorities didn’t think the two shootings were connected, reports spread on Thursday that New England investigators were looking into a possible connection between the two cases.
Valente’s motive is still unknown.
“We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom,” Attorney General of Rhode Island Peter Neronha said.
Authorities issued a now-unsealed criminal complaint against Valente on Thursday shortly before they found his body in New Hampshire.
The gunman entered a Brown University lecture hall with a face mask and rifle in the middle of the university’s finals week on Saturday. Two students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, were killed in the attack. Cook was a sophomore from Alabama and the vice president of Brown’s College Republicans chapter; Umurzokov was a freshman originally from Uzbekistan studying biochemistry and neuroscience.
Six of the nine wounded victims are still hospitalized. All six were in stable condition as of Thursday.
The announcement comes after a six-day manhunt. Classes and exams have been canceled at the Rhode Island college.
Although surveillance cameras captured some grainy footage of the masked perpetrator, “fewer, if any” cameras were installed in the specific section of the lecture hall where the shooting happened, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said. The gunman escaped into surrounding streets after the shooting, beginning what has since become a nearly week-long hunt.
“He could be anywhere,” Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said on Wednesday. “We still don’t know who the person is or where he is.”
Police received a tip early on in the investigation about potential person-of-interest, a man in his 20s, who was then taken into custody. After processing evidence, law enforcement determined there was no basis to keep the man in custody.