Brown student suspected of killing 2 at university and fatally shooting MIT professor is found dead, AP source says
A man who is suspected of killing two and wounding several others at Brown University was found dead Thursday in a New Hampshire storage facility, officials said.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Brown student and Portuguese national, was found dead Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Col. Oscar Perez, the Providence police chief, said at a news conference.
Investigators believe Valente is responsible for both the shooting at Brown and the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who was fatally shot in his Brookline home Monday, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press. Authorities have not formally confirmed a connection between the two shootings.
The official could not publicly discuss details of the investigation and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
Two people were killed and nine were wounded in the mass shooting Saturday at Brown University. The investigation had shifted Thursday when authorities said they were looking into a connection between the Brown mass shooting and an attack two days later near Boston that killed MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro.
The FBI previously said it knew of no links between the cases.
The Brown investigation
Frustration had been mounting in Providence that the person behind the attack managed to get away and that a clear image of their face had yet to emerge.
“There’s no discouragement among people who understand that not every case can be solved quickly,” the state attorney general, Peter Neronha, said at a news conference Wednesday.
Authorities scoured the area for evidence and pleaded with the public to check any phone or security footage they might have from the week before the attack, believing the shooter might have cased the scene ahead of time.
Investigators released videos from the hours and minutes before and after the shooting that show a person who, according to police, matched witnesses' description of the shooter. In the clips, the person was standing, walking and even running along streets just off campus, but always with a mask on or their head turned.
Although Brown officials said there were 1,200 cameras on campus, the attack happened in an older part of the engineering building that has few, if any cameras. And investigators believed the shooter entered and left through a door that faces a residential street bordering campus, which might explain why the cameras Brown has didn’t capture footage of the person.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said Wednesday that the city was doing “everything possible” to keep residents safe.
Lessons from past investigations
In 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, Me.
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 Chief Executive Brian Thompson in Manhattan last year, was arrested five days later at a McDonald's in Pennsylvania.
Felipe Rodriguez, a retired New York police detective sergeant and adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said it was clear that shooters were learning from others who were caught.
“Most of the time an active shooter is going to go in, and he’s going to try to commit what we call maximum carnage, maximum damage,” Rodriguez said. “And at this point, they’re actually trying to get away. And they’re actually evading police with an effective methodology, which I haven’t seen before.”
MIT mourns the loss of an esteemed professor
Loureiro, who was married, joined MIT in 2016 and was named last year to lead the school's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where he worked to advance clean energy technology and other research. The center, one of MIT's largest labs, had more than 250 people working across seven buildings when he took the helm. He was a professor of physics and nuclear science and engineering.
He grew up in Viseu, in central Portugal, and studied in Lisbon before earning a doctorate in London, according to MIT. He was a researcher at an institute for nuclear fusion in Lisbon before joining MIT, the university said.
“He shone a bright light as a mentor, friend, teacher, colleague and leader, and was universally admired for his articulate, compassionate manner,” Dennis Whyte, an engineering professor who previously led MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, told a campus publication.
Loureiro had said he hoped his work would shape the future.
“It’s not hyperbole to say MIT is where you go to find solutions to humanity’s biggest problems,” Loureiro said when he was named to lead the plasma science lab last year. “Fusion energy will change the course of human history.”
Kruesi, Richer and Tucker write for the Associated Press. Richer and Tucker reported from Washington. AP reporters Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pa., and Hallie Golden in Seattle contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
The shooter and the professor he shot were both Portuguese nationals?
Interesting.
