A man suspected in the fatal shooting at Brown University and killing days later of a professor from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a New Hampshire storage facility, authorities announced Thursday evening. The alleged shooter, 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, was a physics graduate student at Brown more than two decades ago. A legal permanent U.S. resident from Portugal, Valente was living in Miami before he came to Boston last month, authorities said.
They added that he appears to have acted alone and that the motive for the killings remains unknown.
On Saturday, law enforcement officials said, Valente opened fire in a lecture hall at Brown during an economics study session, killing two and wounding nine.
Two days later, he shot and killed MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, authorities said. Loureiro, 47, a professor of nuclear science and engineering, and of physics, was found shot at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, about 45 miles north of Brown.
Valente and Loureiro are believed to have known each other and attended the same academic program between 1995 and 2000 at a university in Portugal, said Leah Foley, the U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts, at a news conference Thursday.
She declined to elaborate on the nature of their connection or say whether the two men had communicated recently, except to say that investigators believe Valente targeted Loureiro but had no known ties to any of the victims at Brown.
The Instituto Superior Técnico, a university in Portugal, confirmed Friday that Valente and Loureiro both enrolled in its physical and technological engineering program in 1995, graduating in 2000.
Nuno Morais, 48, went to school with Loureiro and Valente for five years in Portugal and described both men as “nice and friendly people.” Valente was “more assertive, more engaged, more vocal,” he said, while Loureiro “was more discreet, both in class and in his academic life outside of class.”
“Cláudio was a great colleague, one of the best students in the class,” Morais said. “He was very competitive, he liked having very high grades, and he did get very good grades, but he always shared the materials with his colleagues. I always had an excellent relationship with him.”
When Morais was in school with Valente, he said the suspected shooter showed no signs of mental health problems.
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