The man suspected in Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University was found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound Thursday night in New Hampshire.
Providence Police Col. Oscar Perez announced the suspect was Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a former Brown student from Portugal whose last known address was Miami, Florida. He was found dead in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, about 80 miles north of Providence, after officials tracked his rental car there.
US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Leah Foley said that Neves Valente was the suspect in the murder of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, two days after the Brown shooting.
“Immediately following Professor Loureiro’s murder, Neves Valente drove to a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire,” Foley said.
He had rented the facility, about 40 miles from Brookline, in November, she said. Federal prosecutors had planned to charge him with transporting a firearm and ammunition with intent to commit a felony.
Ted Docks, special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston field office, said that officials believe Neves Valente and Loureiro, the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, attended the same university in Portugal.
Neves Valente was a student at Brown for less than a year, studying physics at the Ivy League college in the 2000-2001 year, Brown president Christina Paxson said.
A Reddit poster “blew this case right open” with information about the vehicle Neves Valente was driving and and encounter he had on the Providence streets after the Brown shooting, Rhode Island attorney general Peter Neronha said.
“He blew this case right open. He blew it open,” he said.
“That person led us to the car, which led us to the name, which led us to the photographs of that individual renting the car, which matched the clothing of our shooter here in Providence, that matched the satchel,” he said.
Officials said the killer switched the plates on his rental car from Florida to Maine after the Rhode Island shooting in an attempt to hide his movements.
Neves Valente’s body was found with two firearms, a satchel seen in some images, and “evidence in the car that matches exactly what we see at the scene here in Providence,” Neronha said.
The affidavit
Authorities in Providence laid out details of their investigation of the Brown shooting, which killed two students and wounded nine more, and the discovery of Neves Valente’s identity, spending nearly 10 minutes discussing the investigation before finally giving his name and revealing he is dead, even as multiple news outlets reported the news. An affidavit filed with a warrant for his arrest on Thursday is even more detailed.
The affidavit charged the suspect with 25 counts — two counts of first degree murder, two counts of discharging a firearm resulting in death, nine counts of discharging a firearm resulting in injury, nine counts of assault with a deadly weapon, one count of carrying a firearm without a license, and two counts of having a large capacity feeding device.
Police found 44 spent 9mm casings on the scene of the Brown shooting. Some of the ammunition recovered was hollow point. A custodian saw the suspect in Brown’s Barus and Holley engineering building on the morning of the shooting, helping police find more video in the surrounding area of him.
Investigators released multiple images and video of a person of interest seen in the area both before and after the shooting, but by Tuesday, officials had still not identified a suspect.
Then, on Tuesday, a post appeared on Reddit that changed the directory of the investigation.
“I’m being dead serious,” the post said. “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. That was the car he was driving. It was parked in front of the little shack behind the Rhode Island Historical Society on the Cooke St side. I know because he used his key fob to open the door, approached it and then something prompted him to back away. When he backed away he relocked the car. I found that odd so when he circled the block I approached the car that is when I saw the Florida plates.”
The post prompted investigators to look again at surveillance video from the area and this time they saw the Nissan Sentra. They released more images on Wednesday, including an as-yet unknown person who appeared to interact with the suspect nearby. That evening, a man who identified himself as John approached two Providence police officers and told them he was the man in the images and the Reddit poster.
John provided more details of his encounter with the suspect — including following him after his observations about the car in the Reddit post.
By that time, investigators had traced the Nissan to an Alamo Rent a Car in Boston, where Neves Valente rented it on December 1. License plate cameras spotted that car in Providence 14 times, beginning on the evening of the day it was rented.
Who is Claudio Neves Valente?
The 48-year-old Portuguese national had no association with Brown University at the time of the shooting Paxson said. He attended from the fall of 2000 until the spring of 2001, when he took a leave of absence before withdrawing completely in July.
Prior to that, he and Loureiro attended the same academic program at a Portuguese university between 1995 and 2000. Foley said Louriero graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico in 2000. In February of that year, Neves Valente was let go from a position at the school.
Neves Valente attended Brown on a student visa and obtained permanent residency in the United States in September 2017. His status between his time at Brown and 2017 is not clear. He was last known to live in Miami.
There are still “a lot of unknowns” in regard to motive, Neronha said. “We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom.”
President Donald J. Trump predictably suspended the green card lottery program that gave Neves Valente his residency in 2017.
Check back for more details.
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[Featured image: Providence Police Department via AP]
