Authorities have confirmed that Claudio Neves Valente, the suspect behind the Brown University mass shooting and the fatal shooting of an MIT professor, was found dead in New Hampshire. Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez stated that Valente died by suicide at a storage facility where two firearms were recovered.
Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national and former Brown physics student, had been a permanent U.S. resident since 2017. Officials believe he acted alone in the attacks, which have sent shockwaves through New England academic communities. No motive has been established.
The rampage began on December 13 when Valente entered a building at Brown University in Rhode Island, where students were taking exams. He killed two individuals—Ella Cook, vice president of Brown’s Republican Party association, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a neurosurgery aspirant from Uzbekistan—and injured nine others, six of whom remain hospitalized in stable condition.
Two days later, on December 15, Valente fatally shot Nuno Loureiro, a physics professor at MIT, at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. Authorities initially struggled to track him, releasing images of a person of interest while conducting a painstaking investigation.
Investigators eventually connected Valente to both incidents through a combination of financial records and surveillance footage. Federal prosecutors noted that Valente had used tactics to evade detection, including swapping license plates on his rental car and using hard-to-trace phones.
The manhunt had initially led to the detention of another individual, who was later released. The attacks have raised questions about campus security, with Brown University confirming that none of its 1,200 security cameras were directly linked to police surveillance systems.
University President Christina Paxson said the community now faces the challenging path of recovery. “Nothing can fully bring closure to the lives that have been shattered by last weekend’s gun violence,” she said. The incidents come amid a year of more than 300 mass shootings in the United States, highlighting ongoing debates over gun control.
