Brown University shooting suspect driven by ‘accumulation of grievances’, FBI says | Brown University shooting
The gunman behind a deadly shooting at Brown University in December was aggrieved by personal failings and sought revenge against those he deemed responsible, federal authorities said Wednesday.
More than four months after Claudio Manuel Neves Valente opened fire on the Ivy League campus, killing two students and wounding nine others, officials with the FBI’s Boston division announced they had completed a key part of the investigation into the shooter.
Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese citizen, also killed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro in a separate shooting at his home outside Boston on Dec. 15, authorities said. Neves Valente was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a storage facility in New Hampshire on December 18, following a manhunt.
Authorities said Neves Valente confessed to the attacks in a series of videos and audio recordings taken after the attacks. He did not express regret.
Neves Valente was “determined to carry out the attack” on Brown University, which he began planning in 2022, authorities said Wednesday. The FBI said the gunman had no family or friends who could have seen the warning signs and notified law enforcement.
The FBI determined that he acted alone and that his victims were “symbolic in nature,” adding that Brown University and Loureiro represented Neves Valente’s “personal failings and injustices that he perceived to have been inflicted by others over time.”
Neves Valente joined Brown two decades ago after completing the physics program at the Instituto Superior Tecnico in Portugal, which he attended with Loureiro. In 2001, she left Brown and left the United States.
He later became a legal permanent resident of the United States in 2017 while living in Florida. He was unemployed when the shootings occurred, and the FBI said his “inflated sense of self contributed to the interpersonal conflicts in his life and led him to believe he was being treated unfairly.”
The agency said it believed that as his failures outweighed his successes, Neves Valente’s “paranoia increased, further increasing his inability to improve, causing him to become mentally disturbed and doomed to die.”
