The gunman responsible for the deadly shooting at Brown University last Saturday knew the MIT professor and nuclear physicist he also allegedly murdered days later.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, was found dead Thursday night from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Investigators believe Valente is responsible for fatally shooting two students and wounding nine Brown University students and then killing MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro two days later at his home in the Boston suburb of Brookline, nearly 50 miles (80 kilometers) from Providence.
United States Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Leah B. Foley detailed that Valente and Loureiro were classmates at an enginerrring program in Portugal, between 1995 and 2000.
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.
It was not clear if the two former classmates had communicated at all since their days in school.
Foley said that surveillance video at the apartment complex where Loureiro was shot on Monday linked the Brown University shooting to that crime.
Valente was allegedly seen in the Brookline neighborhood days before and around the time of the professor’s murder, Foley said. Surveillance video captured at the Salem, NH storage facility in which Valente was found dead showed the suspect wearing the same set of clothes he was caught wearing in Brookline around the time and place of Loureiro’s death, Foley said.
Loureiro was also the Director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
The scientist from Viseu, Portugal, had been working to explain the physics behind astronomical phenomena such as solar flares.
The two Brown students killed during a study session for final exams were 19-year-old sophomore Ella Cook and 18-year-old freshman Mukhammad Aziz 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.
Of the nine students injured in the Brown University shooting, three had been discharged and six were in stable condition Thursday, officials said.
Neves 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. His last known residence was in Miami.
Police credited a person who had several encounters with Neves Valente for providing a crucial tip that led authorities to him.
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