THE suspect in the Brown University mass shooting that killed two people and injured nine others has been found dead, police revealed.
Authorities identified the shooter as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old PhD candidate who studied physics at the prestigious Ivy League school more than 20 years ago.
Neves Valente, a Portuguese national, took his own life inside a storage facility, police chief Oscar Perez said during a press conference.
He was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Perez added.
Investigators believe he is responsible for both the shooting at Brown and the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor two days later at his home.
Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a 47-year-old physicist and fusion scientist, was shot Monday night at his apartment in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Two students were killed and nine were wounded in the shooting last weekend in a Brown University lecture hall.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Neves Valente was enrolled at the school from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001
He was admitted to the graduate school to study physics beginning in September 2000. He had no current affiliation with the university, she said.
Valente and Loureiro attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, US Attorney for Massachusetts Leah B. Foley said.
Loureiro graduated from the physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, in 2000, according to his MIT faculty page.
The same year, Neves Valente was let go from a position at Lisbon University, according to an archive of a termination notice from the school’s then-president in February 2000.
Brown University is one of the oldest and most prestigious universities in the US with about 7,300 undergraduates and just over 3,000 graduate students.
Two days ago, the FBI shared a compilation of video footage showing the suspected shooter.
It showed a man walking, loitering and sometimes running along the street, both before and after the shooting.
The horrific shooting occurred on Saturday afternoon near the conclusion of an economics class in the Barus & Holley engineering and physics building on the campus in Providence, Rhode Island.
Students at the Ivy League school had been preparing for final exams and the upcoming winter break.
Around 60 students were in a lecture theatre when the shooter burst in and opened fire at around 4 pm.
Some students fled the hall, while others dived for shelter under chairs and shielded behind desks.
Among the two people killed was sophomore student Ella Cook, 19.
Cook, from Alabama, was the vice president of the school’s Republican club. She had attended the Ivy League university since 2024.
The other victim killed was identified as MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, a first-year student from Uzbekistan.
Nine people were injured in the shooting. Kendall Turner, a Durham Academy graduate, is critically injured.
Vigils have since been held at the university, as family and friends mourn the victims.
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