US investigators probe the failed academic past of Brown University shooter Claudio Neves Valente, who killed two students and an MIT professor.
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND/LISBON: US investigators are examining the failed academic past of Claudio Neves Valente as they search for a motive in last week’s shootings.
The 48-year-old was a promising doctoral physics student at Brown University for a few months around 2000 before dropping out in 2003.
Police say he returned to the Ivy League campus nearly a week ago, armed with at least one handgun, killing two students and injuring several others.
Two days into the manhunt, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was fatally shot outside Boston.
The victim was Nuno Loureiro, who had been Valente’s classmate at Lisbon’s elite Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal in the late 1990s.
Investigators announced on Thursday they believe both attacks were committed by Valente.
His body was found on Thursday in a rented storage locker in Salem, New Hampshire.
An autopsy found Valente shot himself in the head and had likely been dead since Tuesday.
Two 9mm pistols recovered with his body were forensically linked to both shootings.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Valente likely took courses in the Barus & Holley building where the shooting occurred.
“There was no sign of any recent contact,” Paxson wrote in a campus message.
“No Brown employee spoken to so far has any memory of him.”
Hospitalised survivors of the classroom attack did not know their assailant but later recognised him from photos.
One victim “froze, physically pushed back, and became emotional” upon seeing Valente’s image, a police affidavit stated.
The two students killed at Brown were Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov.
Valente won the US green card lottery and became a lawful permanent resident in 2017.
His immigration paperwork listed Brown’s Barus & Holley building as his institution’s address, despite having dropped out over 15 years earlier.
MIT mourned Loureiro, 47, calling him “an incredible scientist, colleague, mentor, and friend.”
“It’s quite shocking to even think that someone who studied with (Loureiro) may have had some kind of anger,” said Bruno Goncalves, director of a Lisbon institute where Loureiro once worked.
Valente grew up in Torres Novas, Portugal, and competed in a Physics Olympiad as a high school student.
He became a teaching assistant at Instituto Superior Tecnico before his contract was terminated in February 2000.
Loureiro earned a PhD from Imperial College London and became an MIT professor in 2016.
Physicist Luis Batalha wrote that Loureiro was a “rare local hero” and role model to Portuguese physicists.
