A man suspected in the fatal shootings at Brown University and of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor has been found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility after a five-day search that spanned several New England states, US authorities said Thursday.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said Col. Oscar Perez, the Providence police chief. Perez said as far as investigators know, the Neves Valente acted alone.
Investigators believe he is responsible for both the shooting at Brown and the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor two days later at his Brookline home, nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) away, US attorney for Massachusetts Leah B. Foley said.
Two students were killed and nine were wounded in the shooting Saturday in a Brown University lecture hall. The investigation had shifted Thursday when authorities said they were looking into a connection between the Brown attack and the fatal shooting of 47-year-old MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Neves Valente was enrolled at Brown from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001. He was admitted to the graduate school to study physics beginning in September 2000. “He has no current affiliation with the university,” The Associated Press quoted her as saying.
Valente and Loureiro attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, Foley said. Loureiro graduated from the physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, in 2000, according to his MIT faculty page. The same year, Neves Valente was let go from a position at the Lisbon university, according to an archive of a termination notice from the school’s then-president in February 2000.
Neves Valente had studied at Brown on an F1 visa. He eventually obtained legal permanent residence status in September 2017, Foley said. His last known residence was in Miami.
President Donald Trump suspended on Thursday the green card lottery program that allowed Neves Valente into the US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that at Trump’s direction she is ordering the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program. The diversity visa program makes up to 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that are little represented in the United States, many of them in Africa.
The FBI previously said it knew of no links between the two shootings.
How the investigation has unfolded Police credited a Brown University custodian who had several encounters with Neves Valente as providing the crucial tip that led to the shooting suspect.
“When you do crack it, you crack it. And that person led us to the car, which led us to the name,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said.
After police shared images of a person of interest, the janitor recognized him and posted his suspicions on social media forum Reddit, where he was a regular commenter. Other Reddit users urged him tell the FBI, and the witness said he did.
But it took days before police say they interviewed him after publicizing a video where Neves Valente appeared to run away from the other man. The Reddit commenter didn’t respond to questions from The Associated Press earlier week but returned to the forum on Wednesday night to say that he was just interviewed by investigators.
“Respectfully, I have said all I have to say on the matter to the right people,” the Reddit commenter wrote Wednesday night, adding hope that the person of interest “is apprehended soon so the authorities can get to the bottom of this.”
His tip gave investigators a key detail: a Nissan sedan with Florida plates. That enabled Providence police officers to tap into a network of more than 70 street cameras operated around the city by surveillance company Flock Safety. Those cameras track license plates and other vehicle details.
After leaving Rhode Island for Massachusetts, Providence officials said the suspect stuck a Maine license plate over the rental car’s plate to help conceal his identity.
Video footage showed Neves Valente entering an apartment building near Loureiro's. About an hour later, he was seen entering the storage facility where he was found dead, Foley said.
There are still “a lot of unknowns” in regard to motive, Neronha said. “We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom,” he said.
Frustration had mounted in Providence that the person behind the attack managed to get away and that a clear image of their face hadn’t emerged.
Although Brown officials say there are 1,200 cameras on campus, the attack happened in an older part of the engineering building that has few, if any, cameras.
And investigators believe the shooter entered and left through a door that faces a residential street bordering campus, which might explain why the cameras Brown does have didn’t capture footage of the person.
What happened in past investigations? In such targeted and highly public attacks, the shooters typically kill themselves or are killed or arrested by police, said Katherine Schweit, a retired FBI agent and expert on mass shootings. When they do get away, searches can take time.
In the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, it took investigators four days to catch up to the two brothers who carried it out. In a 2023 case, Army reservist Robert Card was found dead of an apparent suicide two days after he killed 18 people and wounded 13 others in Lewiston, Maine.
The man accused of killing conservative political figure Charlie Kirk in September turned himself in about a day and a half after the attack on Utah Valley University's campus.
And Luigi Mangione, who has pleaded not guilty to murder charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in Manhattan last year, was arrested five days later at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania.
