A 48-year-old former Brown University graduate student, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, was found dead Thursday after being identified as the suspect in last weekend’s mass shooting that left two students dead and nine others wounded. Authorities confirmed he took his own life in a storage unit in New Hampshire.
Valente had previously been granted lawful permanency in 2017 through a student visa program, which has now been paused to prevent future harm. Officials described his movements leading up to the shootings, including steps taken to conceal himself from authorities.
The suspect was also linked to another crime, fatally shooting an MIT professor two days after the Rhode Island campus shooting. Authorities confirmed both men were natives of Portugal and studied in the same academic program in Portugal in the 1990s.
Valente’s body was discovered during a multi-state manhunt that had stretched on for days. His last known address was in Miami, but he had rented a hotel room in Boston and a car with Florida plates before the shooting.
An investigation revealed Valente had spent time in Brown’s physics building, which was targeted in the shooting, and had recently rented a storage unit in New Hampshire. The motive behind the back-to-back shootings is still unclear.
Source: https://abcnews.go.com/US/brown-mass-shooting-mit-professor-murder-linked-sources/story?id=128530691