On the menu today: The Brown University shooter is not a threat to anyone anymore, but we’re all left to piece together the puzzle about the shooter’s motive. Elsewhere, in Wisconsin, a jury concludes that Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan did indeed break the law when she tried to help an illegal immigrant evade ICE agents. Read on.
How the Brown and MIT Professor Murders Were Connected
The good news is that authorities identified the man who went on the murder spree in a Brown University classroom, and who then traveled to Massachusetts to murder MIT professor Nuno Loureiro. The perpetrator, 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, is no longer a threat to anyone.
The bad news is that because Neves Valente killed himself in a storage facility in Salem, N.H., authorities and the rest of us are left to piece together why the shooter went on his rampage that left three people dead and nine injured.
Based upon what we know as of early Friday morning, the initial theories of a potential jihadist or the deliberate targeting of a College Republican do not pan out. The contention that witnesses who said he “yelled something” were not, as far as we can tell, suppressing the fact that he was yelling “Allahu akbar” or some other jihadist-associated terminology.
Peter F. Neronha, the Rhode Island attorney general, said during last night’s press conference, “There are some witnesses who said he said nothing. There are some that say he made a barking noise.” He held up his hands and added, “Don’t ask me. I don’t know why.”
Last night, Brown University president Christina Paxson said that the shooter was enrolled at the university from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001, admitted to Brown’s graduate school to study in the Masters of Science Ph.D. program in physics. “The majority of physics classes at Brown have always been held within the Barus & Holley classrooms and labs. . . . I think it’s safe to assume that this man, when he was a student, spent a great deal of time in that building for classes and other activities.” The shooter did not complete his program and formally withdrew in 2003. Up until last month, he lived in Miami.
After shooting the students at Brown University, the perpetrator traveled to the Brookline, Mass., home of MIT nuclear science and engineering professor Nuno Loureiro, and shot him.
Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, said at a news conference late Thursday evening that the shooter and Loureiro are believed to have known each other and attended the same academic program between 1995 and 2000 at a university in Portugal.
These facts suggest that the motive was something personal — rage and/or jealousy, or some sort of unresolved anger from the shooter’s experience at Brown University decades ago.
Remarkably, it appears a Reddit post played a key role in tracking down the shooter:
Known only as “John” in a Providence police affidavit, the source is being hailed by investigators as the key figure who gave law enforcement the details needed to determine who was behind the Brown shooting, as well as the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who was shot in his Brookline home Monday.
According to police, John had several encounters with 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente before Saturday’s attack. As police posted images of a person of interest — now identified as Neves Valente — John began posting on the social media forum Reddit that he recognized the person and theorized that police should look into “possibly a rental” grey Nissan.
Reddit users urged him to tell the FBI, and John said he did. The police affidavit said they learned about the tip on Dec. 16, three days after the shooting and a day after the tip line was created.
Up until that point, the police affidavit says officials had not connected a vehicle to the possible shooter.
You may recall that I started the week marveling that a mass shooter could get into an auditorium on an Ivy League campus and, seemingly, never get caught on a campus security surveillance camera, either coming or going. During the week, university officials affirmed the campus has “more than 1,200 cameras installed across campus buildings and spaces in both interior and exterior locations.” (None of the cameras are connected to the Providence Police Department’s “Real Time Crime Center,” which was funded by a $1 million federal grant.) But for the Barus and Holley building, “In that older part of the building, there are fewer, if any, cameras in that part of the building,” AG Neronha said earlier this week.
During Sunday evening’s press conference, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley told the public, “We have no additional actionable information from the video that has been reviewed from the building.”
During last night’s press conference, Christina Paxson insisted that the presence of additional surveillance cameras in the Barus and Holley building would not have changed anything:
Reporter: I want to go back to the question I asked you Saturday night when I first arrived on the scene. There were no cameras in this building and law enforcement, some that are standing up behind you, have said ‘If Brown had cameras in that part of the building, we would have gotten this guy’ and it may have stopped this swirling action. Can you answer that question for me?
Paxson: Well, I don’t think we have said the locations of cameras at Brown. We–
Reporter: There are no cameras in that building, because why would they take it from a rental car agency?
Paxson: We have 1,200 cameras at Brown–
Reporter: But not in that building.
Paxson: We have some in that building. It’s a large complex and I think what you would see is the video evidence in this case — from my perspective. I’m not a law enforcement agent — has been incredibly helpful. The moving of the person around the neighborhood, those video images, they helped crack this case. So, I think video was important. And as the attorney general explained at a recent press conference, this individual was not spending his time on the Brown campus. He came into a building on the edge of the campus. He left. He was in the neighborhoods. The investigation focused on the neighborhoods. The video was there and that was really, really instrumental in cracking the case.
Reporter: And my second follow — and this is my follow-up, Madam President, if you’d stay at the podium. Yes, video played a big role in this case: the neighbors’ video, the rental car video, but not the video from the building that he walked in freely both before when he got in the confrontation and when he came back in, [and] decided to kill people. You didn’t have cameras in that building. Just say it so we could get this over. And my next question is, will you put cameras? Will you put the cameras in the building? Will there be more cameras in that building?
Paxson: Yeah. You know, I think we need to look back. We’ll look at everything that is done, but I do not think a lack of cameras in that building had anything to do with what happened there.
Really?
It is likely that at some point, someone will shoehorn this case into an argument about immigration. But the shooter was a legal immigrant, and first came to the U.S. a quarter-century ago:
Neves Valente (age 48) was born in Torres Novas, Santarem, Portugal and was a Legal Permanent Resident of the United States. Neves Valente arrived in the United States in August 2000 as an F-1 student at Brown University and subsequently obtained U.S. lawful permanent residency in April 2017. While at Brown University, he was enrolled in a doctoral program but subsequently withdrew from the university.
Someone’s going to argue, “We shouldn’t have let him in because of the threat he presented.” In fact, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted on X late last night that the gunman “entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card. This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country.”
But at this point, we have no evidence to suggest this man offered any signs of being a threat, either in 2000 or in 2017.
Jury Convicts Judge
This newsletter, back on April 28: “If the events occurred as described in the affidavit of criminal complaint against circuit court judge Hannah Dugan are accurate, then she committed obstruction of justice and concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest, and it’s extremely difficult to envision an alternate interpretation of the known facts that would exculpate Judge Dugan.”
Last night, a jury concluded that they agreed:
A jury found a Wisconsin judge accused of helping a Mexican immigrant dodge federal authorities guilty of obstruction Thursday, marking a victory for President Donald Trump as he continues his sweeping immigration crackdown across the country.
Federal prosecutors charged Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan with obstruction, a felony, and concealing an individual to prevent arrest, a misdemeanor, in April. The jury acquitted her on the concealment count, but she still faces up to five years in prison on the obstruction count.
You may recall that back in April, Minnesota Senator Tina Smith contended on X, “If Kash Patel and Donald Trump don’t like a judge, they think they can arrest them.” Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin insisted, “The President’s administration arresting a sitting judge is a gravely serious and drastic move, and it threatens to breach those very separations of power.” Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar wrote, “The Administration’s arrest of a sitting judge in Wisconsin is a drastic move that threatens the rule of law.”
This was all partisan nonsense, hand-waving away criminal acts on the part of the judge and unjustly demonizing the FBI and the administration.
On PBS, New York Times columnist David Brooks said of Dugan’s alleged actions, “It strikes me as maybe something illegal, but it also strikes me as something heroic.”
Well, the jury agreed with the first part of Brooks’s statement.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, give credit to soon-to-depart deputy director of the FBI, Dan Bongino, for following the facts, even if they contradicted his conspiracy-minded perspective from his podcasting career, and the Democratic National Committee has decided to lock up its most closely guarded secret: Why they lost the 2024 elections.