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Investigators are trying to sort out why a former Brown University student allegedly opened fire on the campus decades after he dropped out and later gunned down an esteemed Massachusetts college professor he attended school with in Portugal in the 1990s. Authorities say Claudio Neves Valente was found dead Thursday night in New Hampshire from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Investigators believe he opened fire in a Brown lecture hall last Saturday, killing two students and wounding nine others, before heading to the Boston area and killing Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro on Monday. He was a Brown graduate student from fall 2000 until spring 2001, and he and Loureiro attended the same Portuguese academic program before that.
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Investigators on Friday were trying to sort out why a former Brown University student allegedly opened fire on the campus decades after he dropped out and later gunned down an esteemed Massachusetts college professor he attended school with in Portugal in the 1990s.
Claudio Neves Valente, who, like Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro, was a Portuguese national living in the U.S., was found dead Thursday night from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, said Providence’s police chief, Col. Oscar Perez.
The discovery of the 48-year-old Neves Valente’s body at a New Hampshire storage facility ended the nearly weeklong hunt for the person who killed two students and wounded nine others in a Brown lecture hall last Saturday. Investigators believe the onetime Brown student killed Loureiro in his home in Brookline, a Boston suburb about 50 miles (80 kilometers) north of Providence, on Monday. Perez said as far as investigators know, Neves Valente acted alone.
Portugal’s foreign minister, Paulo Rangel, said Friday that the government was taken aback by revelations that a Portuguese man is the main suspect in the mass shooting at Brown and the killing of Loureiro. Police in Portugal said they were contacted by U.S. authorities Thursday once Neves Valente was named.
Rangel said Portugal has provided “very broad cooperation” in the case. He said in comments to the national news agency Lusa that “the investigation is far from over.”
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Neves Valente was enrolled there as a graduate student studying physics from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001.
“He has no current affiliation with the university,” she said.
Neves Valente and Loureiro attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, U.S. attorney for Massachusetts Leah B. Foley said. Loureiro graduated from the physics program at Instituto Superior T袮ico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, in 2000, according to his MIT faculty page. That same year, Neves Valente was let go from his temporary student support and faculty liaison position at the Lisbon university, according to an archive of a termination notice from the school’s president at the time.
Neves Valente, who was born in Torres Novas, Portugal, about 75 miles (121 kilometers) north of Lisbon, had come to Brown on a student visa. He eventually obtained legal permanent resident status in September 2017, Foley said. It wasn’t immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017. His last known residence was in Miami.
After officials revealed the suspect’s identity, President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program that allowed Neves Valente to stay in the United States.
There are still “a lot of unknowns” in regard to motive, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said. “We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom,” he said.
Tip helps investigators connect the dots
The FBI previously said it knew of no links between the Rhode Island and Massachusetts shootings.
Police credited a person who had several encounters with Neves Valente for providing a crucial tip that led authorities to him.
After police shared security video of a person of interest, the witness — known only as “John” in a Providence police affidavit — recognized him and posted his suspicions on the social media forum Reddit. Reddit users urged him to tell the FBI, and John said he did.
John said he encountered Neves Valente about two hours before the attack in a bathroom in the engineering building, which was where the shooting occurred, and noticed he was wearing inappropriate clothing for the weather, according to the affidavit. Still before the attack, he again bumped into Neves Valente a couple blocks away and saw him suddenly turn away from a Nissan sedan when he saw John.
“When you do crack it, you crack it. And that person led us to the car, which led us to the name,” Neronha said.
His tip pointed investigators to a Nissan Sentra with Florida plates. That enabled Providence police 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, Providence officials said Neves Valente stuck a Maine license plate over his rental car’s plate to help conceal his identity.
Investigators found footage of Neves Valente entering an apartment building near Loureiro’s in a Boston suburb. About an hour later, Neves Valente was seen entering the Salem, New Hampshire, storage facility where he was found dead, Foley said. He had with him a satchel and two firearms, Neronha said.
Victims include renowned physicist, political organizer and aspiring doctor
Loureiro, a 47-year-old physicist and fusion scientist, joined MIT in 2016 and was named last year to lead the school’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, one of its largest laboratories. The scientist from Viseu, Portugal, had been working to explain the physics behind astronomical phenomena such as solar flares.
In Lisbon, he was remembered as a highly regarded researcher and instructor for “all the contributions he gave and what he could still have given, all the equations left unwritten,” said Professor Bruno Gon栬ves, head of the Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion at Instituto Superior T袮ico.
Gon栬ves added, “It is difficult to imagine in what context someone would want to harm someone that works in this field.”
The two Brown students killed during a study session for final exams were 19-year-old sophomore Ella Cook and 18-year-old freshman MukhammadAziz Umurzokov. Cook was active in her Alabama church and served as vice president of the Brown College Republicans. Umurzokov’s family immigrated to the U.S. from Uzbekistan when he was a child, and he aspired to be a doctor.
As for the wounded, three had been discharged and six were in stable condition Thursday, officials said.
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.
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Associated Press reporters Barry Hatton and Helena Alves in Lisbon, Portugal, Mark Scolforo in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Audrey McAvoy in Honolulu, Hallie Golden in Seattle and Matt O’Brien in Providence contributed.
