A man suspected of killing two and wounding several others at Brown University has been found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility where he had rented a unit, officials said.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national and a former Brown student, was found dead on Thursday evening from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Oscar Perez, the Providence police chief, said at a news conference. Perez said as far as investigators know, the suspect acted alone.
Valente is also believed to have killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor at his Boston-area home, the AP said, citing a law enforcement official. Authorities have not formally confirmed a connection between the two shootings.
“He took his own life tonight,” Perez said at a press conference, where he identified Valente and described the chain of events that had led law enforcement to the storage facility.
Neronha said Valente was found dead with a bag, and two firearms, as well as evidence in the car “that matches exactly what we see at the scene here in Providence”.
Neronha told reporters that a person with information about the suspected shooter played a key role in finding him. After officials publicized a photo of the suspect about 24 hours ago, an individual “came forward to two Providence police officers over on the east side and said he had information that he was that person and that he had information that could help this case”.
“He blew this case right open,” Neronha said at a press conference. “He blew it open.”
The person’s information led authorities to a vehicle that helped them find a name, “which led us to the photographs of that individual renting the car, which matched the clothing of our shooter here in Providence, that matched the satchel”, Neronha explained.
Neronha said the suspect tried to evade law enforcement by changing license plates.
“This guy was changing plates was one of the reasons,” he said. “He knew what he was doing … we got a main plate and we’ve got a Florida plate on the same car.”
The Brown University president, Christina Paxson, said Valente was enrolled at Brown 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 has no current affiliation with the university,” she said.
Physics classes typically require access to special equipment, Paxson said, which was located in the building where the shooting took place.
Two people were killed and nine were wounded in the mass shooting on Saturday at Brown.
The investigation shifted on Thursday when authorities said they were looking into a connection between the Brown mass shooting and an attack two days later near Boston that killed 47-year-old MIT professor Nuno FG Loureiro.
Ted Docks, FBI special agent in charge of Boston, told reporters that authorities thought the suspect attended the same university in Lisbon as the MIT professor.
Peter Neronha, the attorney general of Rhode Island, said the suspect obtained lawful permanent resident status in September 2017.
Confirmation of the suspected shooter’s death came hours after dozens of law enforcement agents convened on a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire. Shortly before 8pm, journalist Eli Sherman reported: “Multiple law enforcement officials carrying weapons and wearing full tactical gear” entered the storage facility.
The manhunt for the shooter had started afresh on Monday morning after the state’s attorney general announced that a person of interest detained on Sunday had been released, a development that Providence mayor Brett Smiley conceded was “likely to cause fresh anxiety for our community”.
Smiley told CNN that while the release of the original person of interest had been a setback, “that didn’t mean that the other pieces of the investigation were stopped or in any way paused”.
The FBI director, Kash Patel, faced criticism on Monday for rushing to social media to celebrate the bureau’s work, only for the person arrested to be freed hours later.
The two students killed were identified by family as Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, an Uzbek national in his first year at Brown. Cook was vice-president of Brown’s College Republicans of America chapter; Umurzokov dreamed of becoming a neurosurgeon.
