A frantic search for the suspect in last weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University ended at a New Hampshire storage facility, where authorities discovered the man dead inside and revealed he also was suspected of killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, was found dead on Thursday night from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said.
Investigators believe he is responsible for fatally shooting two students and wounding nine other people in a Brown lecture hall, then killing MIT professor Nuno Loureiro two days later at his home in the Boston suburbs, nearly 80km from Providence.
Photo: Reuters
As far as investigators know, Valente acted alone, Perez said.
Brown University president Christina Paxson said 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.
Valente and Loureiro previously attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, US attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley said.
Loureiro graduated from the physics program at Instituto Superior Tecnico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, in 2000, his MIT faculty page says.
The same year, Valente was let go from a position at the university, an archive of a termination notice from the school’s then-president in February 2000 showed.
Valente had come to Brown on a student visa. He eventually obtained legal permanent residence status in September 2017, Foley said.
It was not immediately clear where he was between taking a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
After officials revealed the suspect’s identity, US President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program that allowed Neves Valente to stay in the US.
US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem on Thursday suspended a green card lottery, saying it was used by the suspect in a mass shooting at Brown University.
Valente “entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program [DV1] in 2017 and was granted a green card,” Noem said.
“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS [US Citizenship and Immigration Services] to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program,” Noem said. “This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country.”
Police credited a person who had several encounters with Valente for providing a crucial tip that led to the suspect.
After police shared security video of a person of interest, the witness — known only as “John” in a police affidavit — recognized him.
John said he had encountered Valente hours earlier in the bathroom of the engineering building where the shooting occurred and noticed he was wearing inappropriate clothing for the weather, the affidavit said. He again bumped into Valente a couple blocks away and saw him suddenly turn away from a Nissan sedan when he saw John.
His tip pointed investigators to a Nissan Sentra with Florida plates.
Providence officials said that after leaving Rhode Island, Valente stuck a Maine license plate over his rental car’s plate to help conceal his identity.
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