(NEW YORK) — The suspect in last weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University that left two students dead and nine others wounded was found dead Thursday — and authorities said he is the same man who gunned down an MIT professor two days after the Rhode Island campus shooting.
During a news conference Thursday, authorities identified the suspect as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown graduate student, who attended the school some 25 years ago.
Officials said he took his own life. His body was discovered in a New Hampshire storage unit following an intense, multi-state manhunt that had stretched on for days.
“Tonight our Providence neighbors can finally breathe a little easier,” Mayor Brett Smiley told reporters at at news conference Thursday night.
Officials said there is no evidence Valente was working with anyone else, describing in detail his movements leading up to and after the shooting, including steps he took to conceal himself from authorities.
Officials have not yet provided a motive for the back-to-back shootings that left residents of parts of New England on edge for days.
Former Ph.D student who spent time in engineering building
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Neves Valente had enrolled as a Ph.D student in Brown’s physics program in 2000 and attended for less than a year, before going on a leave of absence and then withdrawing. She said it was believed, as a physics student, he spent considerable time in the Barus & Holley engineering building that was targeted in the shooting on Saturday.
Valente, who entered the U.S. in 2000 on a student visa, obtained lawful permanency in April 2017, authorities said.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said the suspect was granted a visa through the diversity lottery program in 2017 and said that DHS would be pausing the program immediately “to ensure no more Americans are harmed,” according to a statement posted on X early Friday morning.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country. In 2017,” said Noem.
He had no current affiliation with the school, according to officials.
How 2 puzzling crimes were linked
Authorities in Massachusetts confirmed Valente is also the suspected gunman in the death of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro in Brookline, who was fatally shot on Monday night in the foyer of his building in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Both men were natives of Portugal, and U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley told reporters at a news conference late Thursday night it’s believed Valente and Loureiro studied in the same academic program in Portugal in the 1990s.
It was only the past day or two that the “link began to be established,” between the two puzzling crimes, Foley told reporters as authorities.
Valente’s last known address was in Miami, but he had rented a hotel room in Boston in late November, Foley said. On Dec. 1, he rented a gray Nissan Sentra, which was later observed intermittently in the campus area over the next 12 days leading up to the shooting, she said.
How investigators tracked suspect down
Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez said local police helped tracked down Valente thanks, in part, to surveillance video and a detailed tip about a vehicle being driven by a person who noted odd behavior by the suspect.
“I’m being dead serious. Police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental,” the tipster told police, according to a complaint released by Rhode Island authorities. “That was the car he was driving.”
The tip and surveillance video, along with the use of license-plate reader technology led investigators to a car rental agency in Massachusetts. There, police obtained a copy of the rental agreement with the suspect’s name, as well as video of the suspect that matched the videos of the person of interest seen on the Brown University campus on the day of the shooting.
What happened at New Hampshire storage facility
Authorities said that discovery ultimately led them to a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, on the border with Massachusetts, where Valente had rented a unit. Foley, the U.S. attorney, said investigators believe Valente had fled to the storage facility shortly after the shooting of the MIT professor on Monday night.
By Thursday night, investigators were closing in on the storage facility, obtaining a search warrant, which FBI SWAT teams executed shortly before 9 p.m.
Authorities said Valente’s body was found in a storage unit next to the one he had rented. He was found with a satchel containing two firearms.
The two Brown students who were killed were identified as 19-year-old Ella Cook and 18-year-old MukhammadAziz Umurzokov. They were both fatally struck by gunfire when the shooter burst into the first-floor auditorium where a review session for an economics course was taking place.
The building was unlocked for exams being held in the building at the time of the shooting, the university president said.
Authorities also said Thursday someone confronted the gunman in a bathroom in the building and said he felt like he didn’t belong there.
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