Investigators have revealed that the gunman responsible for killing two students at Brown University also killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor two days later.
The motives of 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente for both attacks remains unclear, but federal prosecutors on Thursday disclosed an interesting detail about the relationship of the killer to one of his victims.
Nuno F.G. Loureiro, the 47-year-old MIT professor, was fatally shot at his home in the Boston suburb of Brookline by his former classmate.
Neves Valente had previously attended the same academic programme in Portugal as Dr. Loureiro, from 1995 to 2000.
Dr. Loureiro graduated with a degree in physics from the Instituto Superior Técnico in 2000. He worked as a researcher at the institute until 2016, when he moved to the United States to join MIT as a professor of nuclear science and engineering.
The same year Dr. Loureiro graduated from Portugal’s premier engineering school in Lisbon, Neves Valente was let go from a position, according to an archive of a termination notice from the school’s then-president in February 2000.
The Portuguese national entered the United States via a student visa, enrolling briefly in a graduate physics programme at Brown, until the spring of 2001.
Neves Valente revisited his former university in Providence, Rhode Island on December 13 and fired at least 44 rounds from his 9 mm pistol, killing two students and injuring another nine.
Two days later, he travelled 50 miles and fatally shot Dr Loureiro, a father of three, at his home in the Boston suburbs before disappearing, triggering a five-day manhunt.
He was found dead Thursday night in a storage rental facility in Salem, New Hampshire, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, who attended Brown University from 2000 to 2001, was found dead Thursday night
Married father-of-three Nuno FG Loureiro (pictured), 47, was gunned down at his home in a leafy Boston suburb at 8.30pm on December 15
Despite the links between Dr. Loureiro and his killer, Neves Valente, authorities said that his motive in the attacks remains a mystery.
With the gunman’s death, the authorities said that both cases in Providence and Brookline were closed.
‘He is the person responsible not only for the Brown shootings, but for the Brookline shooting,’ the US attorney in Massachusetts, Leah Foley, said in a news briefing on Thursday evening.
‘We hope that this outcome tonight brings an increased sense of safety for our community,’ said Christina Paxson, the president of Brown.
‘I don’t think we have any idea why now, or why Brown, or why these students, why this classroom,’ said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha.
Dr. Loureiro was appointed the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Centre in 2024, one of the school’s largest labs with more than 250 full-time researchers.
MIT paid tribute to him as ‘a lauded theoretical physicist and fusion scientist’, who had been working to explain the physics behind astronomical phenomena such as solar flares.
His neighbour and friend, Louise Cohen, said she discovered his body after hearing shots disturb the peace of their beautiful area on Gibbs Street.
Cohen said she was lighting a menorah candle when she heard gunshots fired. She rushed to the hallway of their building and found Dr Loureiro lying on his back.
The professor’s heartbroken wife was also in the entry along with another neighbour, and they scrambled to dial 911. Dr Loureiro was taken to hospital but died the next day.
His neighbors remembered him as a kind-hearted, ‘wonderful man’, while students flocked to the candle-lit vigil in his memory.
‘This family is so amazing. I can’t imagine anyone wanting to kill him,’ Cohen told the Boston Globe.
MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, sent a university-wide letter expressing ‘great sadness’ over the death of the professor.
‘This shocking loss for our community comes in a period of disturbing violence in many other places,’ said Kornbluth’s letter, released after a weekend defined by the deadly mass shootings at Brown and at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.
Dr Loureiro obtained a doctorate in physics from Imperial College London in 2005, before starting post-doctoral work at Princeton later that year
Dr Loureiro’s neighbours remembered him as a kind-hearted, ‘wonderful man’, while students flocked to the candle-lit vigil in his memory, as shown in the photograph above
Neves Valente came to Brown on a student visa and eventually obtained legal permanent residence status in September 2017.
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.
After officials revealed the suspect’s identity, President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery programme that allowed Neves Valente to stay in the United States.
‘This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,’ Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem posted on X late Thursday.
Noem said she would ‘immediately’ implement a directive by President Trump to pause the green-card lottery ‘to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous programme’.
On December 1, nearly two weeks before the shooting, the gunman rented a Nissan Sentra sedan from an Alamo rental agency in Boston and drove to Brown University.
License plate readers captured the car in the Ivy League university’s vicinity in the days leading up to the campus shooting.
As he made his way across the states, the killer took pains to hide his identity and whereabouts, including changing the rental car’s Florida license plate to an unregistered plate from Maine and using a mobile phone that concealed his location.
‘He was sophisticated in hiding his tracks,’ Foley said.
The car was seen around the Brown campus until December 12, the day before Neves Valente opened fire on an auditorium full of students reviewing for final exams.
The two Brown students killed during the study session 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 US from Uzbekistan when he was a child, and he aspired to be a doctor.
They were in a study session at the Ivy League’s School of Engineering Barus and Holley Building when the gunman burst in shortly after 4pm and opened fire.
As for the wounded, three had been discharged and six were in stable condition Thursday, officials said.
Although Brown officials say there are 1,200 cameras on campus, the attack happened in an older part of the engineering building that has few, if any, cameras.
And investigators believe the shooter entered and left through a door that faces a residential street bordering campus, which might explain why the cameras Brown does have didn’t capture footage of the person.
Dr Loureiro specialised in nuclear science, engineering and physics
Armed police officers gathered outside of a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire on Thursday, where a vehicle that was rented to Neves Valente was found abandoned
There was a heavy police presence outside of the storage facility
Foley declined to provide many details about the evidence linking Neves Valente to Dr Loureiro’s murder, but said video images showed a rental car the shooter was driving near Dr Loureiro’s home.
The IP address associated with Neves Valente’s phone was known to have accessed the internet in the vicinity of the slain professor’s home on the day he was killed, Foley added.
Within hours of shooting Dr. Loureiro, Neves Valente drove to Salem and entered a security facility, where he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound days later.
Police were unable to comment on how long he might have been inside the storage unit.
‘Even though the suspect was found dead tonight our work is not done. There are many questions that need to be answered,’ FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Ted Docks said on Thursday, adding that the agency had deployed approximately 500 agents to assist local authorities in the investigation.
There are still ‘a lot of unknowns’ in regard to motive, Neronha said.
Police credited a person who had several encounters with Neves Valente for providing a crucial tip that led to the suspect.
After police shared security video of a person of interest, the witness – known only as ‘John’ in a Providence police affidavit – recognised him and posted his suspicions on the social media forum Reddit.
John said he had encountered Neves Valente hours earlier in the bathroom of the engineering building where the shooting occurred and noticed he was wearing inappropriate clothing for the weather, according to the affidavit.
He again bumped into Neves Valente a couple blocks away and saw him suddenly turn away from a Nissan sedan when he saw John.
‘I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. That was the car he was driving,’ the post from December 16 read.
‘It was parked in front of the little shack behind the Rhode Island Historical Society on the Cooke [Street] side.’
Reddit users urged him to tell the FBI, and John said he did.
‘When you do crack it, you crack it. And that person led us to the car, which led us to the name,’ Neronha said.
His tip pointed investigators to a Nissan Sentra with Florida plates.
That enabled Providence police to tap into a network of more than 70 street cameras operated around the city by surveillance company Flock Safety.
Those cameras track license plates and other vehicle details.
The witness saw Neves Valente unlock his rental car and gave police a description of that vehicle and its license plate, Providence police chief Oscar Perez said.
Police reviewed video, found the images of Neves Valente’s car, and from there could trace it back to the rental agency.
The rental agency’s security video included Neves Valente’s face and showed him wearing the same clothing worn by the suspect in footage from the Brown University shooting.
Investigators obtained his name from the car rental agreement, and they noted that license plate readers showed Neves Valente had been in the vicinity of the university from December 1 until nearly two weeks later when he carried out the shooting.
Investigators in Providence had said that Neves Valente, whose face was covered by a mask in video from the day of the Brown shooting, escaped on foot into nearby streets after carrying out the campus killings.
That prompted a search that relied heavily on residential security footage because of a lack of surveillance cameras in the classroom building and surrounding area.
Police released images and video of a man believed to be the shooter, based on survivor accounts, and repeatedly sought the public’s help in identifying him.
The footage showed the suspect walking in a nearby neighbourhood both before and immediately after the attack.
Authorities had said they had identified the shadowy figure caught on surveillance footage near the scene of Saturday’s shooting, whose face they had been attempting to find with the help of grainy surveillance footage
Officers were able to secure a search warrant for a unit believed to have been rented by the suspect, and found Neves Valente dead on Thursday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in an unoccupied unit.
He had two firearms on him at the time of his death, Neronha revealed.
‘He was found dead with a satchel, with two firearms and evidence in the car that matches exactly what we see here in Providence,’ he added.
Authorities on Thursday said John’s testimony was critical to finding Neves Valente.
‘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 that we see here in Providence,’ Neronha said.
An affidavit from Rhode Island detailed how the custodian at the school noticed a suspicious person wearing a surgical mask who walked with a limp and stopped in the bathroom of the Barus and Holley Building on December 13.
After authorities discovered the mysterious Reddit post, the man identified as John told police he first encountered the suspect inside the Barus Holley bathroom at around 1.45pm to 2pm.
John described the suspect’s clothing as ‘inappropriate and inadequate for the weather,’ wearing a baggy jacket with at least two undergarment shirt layers.
The witness also ‘described the pants and shoes as kitchen/restaurant worker style, of poor quality or would be associated with Walmart (John cast no judgment as to the quality),’ the affidavit said.
The suspect then kept switching directions every time he saw John, the witness, who described the pattern as a ‘game of cat and mouse’.
After exiting the bathroom, John said he watched the suspect unlock a gray or silver Nissan sedan, before he walked away from the vehicle.
But eventually, John said, he was able to catch up to the suspect, asking him: ‘Your car is back there, why are you circling the block?’
The suspect then reportedly responded, ‘I don’t know you from nobody’ and repeatedly asked John, ‘Why are you harassing me?’
When detectives then showed John two images they obtained of the suspect’s vehicle, he replied: ‘Holy s**t, that might be it!’
Ella Cook, a 19-year-old sophomore at Brown University and a vice president of the school’s Republican club, was identified as one of the two students killed in Saturday’s shooting
Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, the second Brown University victim killed on Saturday, has been remembered by his roommate as an aspiring neurosurgeon and ‘ball of joy’
The big break in the case then came when authorities investigating the Brown shooting saw a call-out from Massachusetts police probing Loureiro’s murder – and realised a vehicle of interest in that case was just like the one they were looking for.
It was the same make and model, but the license plates were different, law enforcement officials told CNN.
A witness then provided a license plate to authorities probing the Brown shooting, who then investigated the vehicle and its past drivers – which police say ultimately led them to confirm the two vehicles were the same.
Police now say the unidentified suspect employed a series of countermeasures to avoid being tracked beyond swapping the license plates, as he apparently planned to avoid surveillance cameras and facial recognition technology by making himself unidentifiable.
He even used a cellphone that obfuscated his location and credit cards that were not in his name, Foley said.
But officers in Massachusetts were able to determine that the Google email he had used to check into a hotel in Boston logged in from an IP address half a mile away from Dr Loureiro’s home on December 14.
The following night, a surveillance camera also captured a blue or gray Nissan Sentra about a mile from the physics professor’s home and footage showed him entering a nearby apartment building.
About an hour later, Neves Valente was seen entering the storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, dressed in the same clothes that he was seen wearing right after Dr Loureiro’s murder, Foley said.
Dr Loureiro specialised in nuclear science, engineering and physics.
He leaves behind ‘many devoted students, friends, and colleagues’, according to his MIT obituary.
His academic career started at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, where he gained a physics degree.
Loureiro obtained a doctorate in physics from Imperial College London in 2005, before starting post-doctoral work at Princeton later that year.
He also worked at the UK Atomic Energy Authority’s Culham Centre for Fusion Energy between 2007 and 2009.
In her university-wide letter following the beloved professor’s death, MIT President Kornbluth offered students a list of mental health resources.
‘It’s entirely natural to feel the need for comfort and support,’ she wrote.
‘If you or anyone you know would like counsel or just a listening ear, I encourage you to make use of our many campus resources.
‘In time, the many communities Nuno belonged to will create opportunities to mourn his loss and celebrate his life.’
‘It’s not hyperbole to say MIT is where you go to find solutions to humanity’s biggest problems,’ Dr Loureiro said upon being appointed to direct one of the university’s largest labs, according to Kornbluth’s letter.
‘Fusion is a hard problem, but it can be solved with resolve and ingenuity – characteristics that define MIT.
‘Fusion energy will change the course of human history. It’s both humbling and exciting to be leading a research centre that will play a key role in enabling that change.’
