Investigators seek motive for shootings of MIT professor and Brown students | Brown University shooting

Investigators on Friday turned to investigating the killings of two Brown University students and a physics professor in Massachusetts in separate but related attacks after the prime suspect was found dead of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound.

The body of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national and briefly a student at Brown, was found Thursday night at a storage facility in New Hampshire after a five-day manhunt.

Authorities say he is responsible for last Saturday’s mass shooting in an engineering building on the university’s campus in Providence, Rhode Island, that killed two people and injured nine others.

The FBI said at a press conference that the suspect, who also revealed the existence of a tipster named “John” who played a key role in directing the investigation into Neves Valente, then drove 50 miles to Brookline, Massachusetts, and shot and killed Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Nuno FG Loureiro at his home on Monday night.

Rhode Island attorney general Peter Neronha said there were still “many unknowns” about the motive for the attack. “We don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students, why this class,” he said, referring to the university’s Barus & Holley engineering building where Brown students Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov were killed.

Brown’s president, Christina Paxson, said Neves Valente “has no current affiliation with the university,” but before leaving, he was enrolled as a graduate student studying physics at Brown from fall 2000 to spring 2001.

At a later news conference in Boston on Thursday, Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney for Massachusetts, said Neves Valente and Loureiro attended the same academic program at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal’s leading engineering university, between 1995 and 2000.

Loureiro, director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, graduated from the physics program at the Lisbon facility in 2000. to his biography. Foley said Neves Valente was terminated from his position at the university that same year.

Detailed information about connections has been received in an affidavit By special agent Bryce Ferrara of the violent crimes task force of the FBI’s Boston field office. In the five-page document, it was revealed that Neves Valente, who received a permanent residence permit in the USA in 2017 and whose last known address was in Miami, rented a gray Nissan Sentra car with a Florida tag from a car rental agency in Boston on December 1.

Images of the vehicle were captured on multiple security cameras near the Brown campus on various dates between Dec. 1 and 12, and were photographed again on Monday near Loureiro’s home with a fake Maine license plate attached, the affidavit states.

“This was an extremely dangerous individual who was capable of extreme violence,” Tom Greco, special agent in charge of the Boston division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), said at the news conference.

Neves Valente’s body was found in a warehouse he rented in Salem, New Hampshire, along with a briefcase and two firearms, as well as evidence that “exactly matched what we saw at the crime scene in Providence,” Neronha said.

This discovery ended a grueling five-day search for the killer; That investigation, analysts say, was hampered by FBI director Kash Patel’s early assertion that the Brown case had been solved after the arrest of a “person of interest” on Sunday.

That person was quickly cleared and released, leading some observers to call for Patel’s resignation and forcing authorities to deny accusations that the incident had delayed the investigation. Authorities then asked for help from the public.

Providence police said several “bizarre encounters” between Neves Valente and the tipster named John before Brown’s shooting helped investigators identify the suspect; Neronha said this development “completely exposes this case.”

According to authorities, John posted on Reddit that he recognized Neves Valente from a photo released by the FBI and urged detectives to look for a “gray Nissan with Florida license plates, possibly for rent.” Until then, authorities had not linked any vehicles to the shootings.

Hours before the attack, John encountered Neves Valente in the bathroom of Brown’s engineering building, where John noted that the suspect’s clothing was “inappropriate and inadequate for weather conditions,” according to the Associated Press.

John also encountered Neves Valente outside near the building, where he watched Neves Valente “suddenly” return from the Nissan, the news agency reported. A “cat-and-mouse game” ensued, in which the two would face each other and Neves Valente would escape, according to John’s statement.

“Everyone in Providence owes a debt of gratitude to this individual,” Providence mayor Brett Smiley said in an interview with CNN on Friday.

“There was a Reddit tip regarding the vehicle that turned out to be a central part of this investigation,” Smiley said.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Thursday that the Trump administration is suspending the green card lottery program that allowed Neves Valente, who entered the United States on a student visa in 2000, to become a permanent resident after 16 years.

The Associated Press contributed to this report