As 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente, a Portuguese national, was identified as the shooter of the Brown University, who after gunning down two students in the university, went to kill MIT professor Nuno FG Loureiro, the manhunt ended but several questions remain unanswered as the motive of the killer is not clear. Neves-Valente was found dead from a self-inflicted wound.
Brown University and MIT connection
The killer entered the United States on a student visa in 2000 and enrolled briefly in a graduate physics program at Brown University. But he left the course in 2001. In 2017, he became a permanent resident and his residence was registered in Florida. While the unfinished course is the killer’s Brown University link, his link with the MIT professor has also been estblished by the investigators. The killer had attended the same academic program in Portugal as MIT professor Loureiro from 1995 to 2000. “The majority of physics classes at Brown have always been held within the Barus & Holley classrooms and labs. . . . I think it’s safe to assume that this man, when he was a student, spent a great deal of time in that building for classes and other activities,” Brown University president Christina Paxson said which shed some light on why the killer targeted only one classroom — as that was probably the classroom where he had studied. Speculations are that the motive was personal, jealousy for MIT professor, who was a former classmate, and possibly some unresolved anger at Brown University from decades ago. The killer rented a Nissan Sentra sedan, drove to Brown University, changed the license plate, disguised his phone location, killed two students at the university and then went to Massachusetts to kill the MIT professor. Then he drove to Salem, New Hampshire and entered a storage facility He was found dead there.
