The suspect in the Brown University shooting was found dead with a “self-inflicted gunshot wound” inside a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, on Thursday night.
Police identified 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente as the suspect. Valente was a former Brown student and a Portuguese national. Officials said he was found with a satchel and two firearms.
“He took his own life tonight,” Providence, Rhode Island Police Chief Oscar Perez said in a press conference.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said the suspect had no active affiliation to the school at the time of his death, but was admitted to the Ph.D. program in physics in September 2000. He took a leave of absence in April 2001 and formally withdrew in July 2003.
Perez said Valente’s last known address was Miami, Florida, but he flew into Providence in October.
A law enforcement official told The Associated Press that investigators believe Valente is responsible for both the Brown shooting and the killing of Nuno Loureiro, 47, an acclaimed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
Loureiro was a Portuguese theoretical physicist and fusion scientist who served as director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center. He was rushed to a hospital with multiple gunshot wounds but died Tuesday morning.
Authorities believe that Valente and Loureiro attended the same university in Portugal, according to Ted Docks, the FBI special agent in charge of the Brown University investigation. Loureiro went to Superior Técnico in Lisbon.
Docks said authorities will continue to search for answers, including what motivated the suspect to commit the “senseless act of violence.”
Law enforcement swarmed a storage facility in Salem after finding an abandoned car with a license plate that authorities believe matches one used by the suspect. Officials earlier told CNN that the suspect used more than one set of license plates.
The shocking development follows the Kash Patel-led FBI’s error-riddled hunt for the shooter, which involved the detention of a “person of interest” who was later released after authorities acknowledged that evidence “now points in a different direction.”
A gunman opened fire as students took their final exams at Brown’s campus on Saturday afternoon. Students Ella Cook of Alabama, 19, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov of Uzbekistan, 18, died in the tragic shooting, while nine others were struck but survived.
President Donald Trump earlier defended Patel from criticisms over his handling of the search for the Brown shooter.
Asked whether Patel has explained the FBI’s difficulty with nailing down the school shooter, Trump, 79, said: “Well, it’s always difficult. So far we’ve done a very good job of doing it.”
“But you’d really have to ask the school about that because this was a school problem,” he added. “They had their own guards, they had their own police, they had their own everything. But you’d have to ask that question, really, to the school and not to the FBI.”
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
