Mystery surrounds motive in Brown, MIT killings after suspect found dead

By Greg Ryan and Brooke Sutherland

 

Fear has given way to relief as the nearly week-long manhunt for a shooter suspected of killing students at Brown University and a renowned nuclear scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology came to a close late Thursday. But confusion also reigns: authorities have yet to spell out a motive for the rampage at Brown and the MIT professor’s murder some 50 miles away.  

Officials identified Claudio Manuel Neves Valente as the suspected shooter in both last weekend’s shooting on Brown’s campus in Providence, Rhode Island that killed two people and injured nine others and the murder of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro days later in Brookline, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb. 

 

 

Authorities found Valente’s dead body in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, just over the border from Massachusetts, after tracking him through a car he rented that was seen in the vicinity of both shootings. 

 

Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said residents have expressed a “tremendous sense of relief” in conversations on Friday.

 

“There’s a sense that a weight was lifted off of all of our shoulders late last night, and now we can start to heal as a community and move forward,” he said in an interview. 

 

There is no longer a threat to the public, authorities said, but they still don’t know why Valente attacked an exam-prep session for a Brown economics class and Loureiro, who led MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. Sophomore Ella Cook and freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov were killed in the shooting at Brown. 

 

A 48-year-old Portuguese national, Valente came to the US on a student visa in the early 2000s to study physics at Brown and was granted a green card through the lottery program in 2017. Late Thursday, the Trump administration said it’s halting the diversity lottery, which allows tens of thousands of people a year to obtain green cards.

 

He enrolled in a doctoral program at Brown but subsequently dropped out. As a physics student, it’s “safe to assume” that Valente “spent a great deal of time” in the Barus & Holley engineering building in which the shooting took place, Brown President Christina Paxson said on Thursday. 

 

He also attended the same university in Lisbon as Loureiro, who also taught in the departments of nuclear science and engineering and physics at MIT, officials said. It’s believed that Loureiro and Valente knew each other, Leah Foley, US attorney for Massachusetts, said Thursday. 

 

Valente’s familiarity with Brown and Loureiro provides one piece of the puzzle but leaves many questions unanswered. Foley said there’s no indication Valente targeted particular students or a specific class at Brown. He had no prior criminal record, she said. 

 

With no clear explanation, anxiety is still festering in Providence and Brookline, two communities that up until now had largely avoided such traumatic bursts of violence. 

 

Rhode Island has one of the lowest rates of death by firearms in the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As of the first half of this year, the last murder Brookline was in 2020, according to crime reports by the local police department. 

 

Brown has said that the university will conduct a “large-scale systemic security review of the entire campus.” Providence will similarly review public-safety actions over the past week as well as “additional tools” that the city should have going forward, Smiley said.

 

“I think we’re all hoping that we can learn why this happened, and why Brown, and why Providence, and why that classroom,” Smiley said. “It’s too soon to tell if we’re going to get those answers.”

 

The prolonged manhunt had gripped Providence as days passed with few apparent advances in the investigation and a striking lack of clear video footage. Brown sent students home early, canceling final exams and any remaining classes and assignments for the fall semester.

 

On Monday, one in five students in the city’s public schools was absent, according to Providence Public School District spokesperson Alex Torres-Perez. More kids started coming to class as the week progressed but attendance is still lower than it was during the same pre-holiday week last year, Torres-Perez said. The district canceled all after-school activities and field trips this week.

 

The city’s shops and restaurants that abut the Brown campus have been empty in the critical runup to Christmas. The holidays are typically one of the year’s best sales stretches for Spectrum-India, a store that sells jewelry, candles and religious and spiritual objects on Thayer Street, a commercial corridor near Brown. But foot traffic’s been slow all week, with the Brown students already back home and Providence residents too shaken up to shop, according to store manager Lisa Paquette. 

 

To help small businesses, the city is considering providing grants and is in talks with the state about helping business owners pursue federal disaster loans, according to Smiley. It’s also working with the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce on a campaign to help affected businesses by encouraging office buildings to buy holiday lunches from local caterers and reminding residents to shop local in the final days before Christmas, he said.

 

Residents are trying to pick up the pieces and get back to some semblance of normalcy. But Spectrum-India was “still really quiet” on Friday as a blustery winter storm hit New England, Paquette said. She has mixed emotions about the developments Thursday night. 

 

“It’s not anything to be joyous about,” she said. “It is what it is. It doesn’t change what happened.”