The suspect in the shooting that killed two students and wounded nine others on the campus of Brown University last Saturday has been identified, police accounted Thursday night.
The suspect has been identified as 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente, Providence Police Chief Oscar Perez announced during a press conference. Valente took his own life with a firearm inside a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire before or after a large contingent of state and federal law enforcement officers surrounded the building.
A Portugese national, Valente was not a U.S. citizen. He was a previously student at the university and his last known address was in Miami, police said. Officials further stated that Valente is believed to have acted alone.
Brown University President Christina Paxson stated that the suspect was enrolled at the school from 2000 to 2001. He was not a current student at Brown, but he was enrolled in a graduate program in physics at another university, possibly MIT. “It is safe to assume that this man, when he was a student, spent a lot of time in that building,” Paxson said of the building where the shooting took place.
Federal agents with the FBI and the ATF were part of an effort to execute two sealed arrest warrants filed by the Justice Department. They closed in on the storage unit, secured the area and discovered the body of the suspect, a senior federal law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the operation told the New York Times.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter F Neronha told reporters that an individual who appeared to cross paths with the suspect came forward with information that “blew this case right open.”
Officials further confirmed that Valente is also believed to have killed MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, who was gunned down inside his home on Monday evening.
Loureiro, who was originally from Portugal and served as the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center since 2024, also held faculty positions in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Physics. He had joined MIT in 2016 after postdoctoral work at Princeton and earlier research in Lisbon.
The six-day manhunt ends after the gunman opened fire on a final exams review session around 4:30 p.m. local time on Saturday. Two people were killed in the attack while nine others suffered gunshot wounds.
Ella Cook, a sophomore who served as vice president of the university’s Republican Club, was identified as one of the fatalities by a priest from her Alabama parish on Sunday morning. Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a native of Uzbekistan and aspiring neurosurgeon, has been identified as the other deceased victim.
Valente is believed to have spent significant time at the Barus & Holley building — the physics and engineering center where the shooting took place — during the time of the shooting. Rhode Island officials did not provide many details on the suspect’s exact motive, but they did note that Valente likely attended the same university as Loureiro in Portugal.
A separate press conference will be held by federal officials in Boston at 10:30 p.m. Eastern Time.
This is a developing story. Additional details will be provided as they become available.
