Deceased Attacker Identified in Deadly Brown University Shooting

The shooter in the deadly shooting at Brown University last week has been identified, but a motive is still unclear.

The incident occurred exactly one week ago after a suspect had been roaming the area around the campus for several hours. The perpetrator entered through the main doors of the Barus & Holley auditorium, which were unlocked due to the final exams taking place at the time, before walking in with two 9mm pistols. He killed two students and injured nine others before running out of the building, escaping from the scene before he could be caught by police.

First, authorities arrested a man at a hotel in Rhode Island, but they later discovered that he was not the culprit.

Two days after the shooting, Neves Valente's MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro was killed, with the same man as the prime suspect. Later, a tip found on Reddit claimed to have identified the suspect's car, describing it as a gray Nissan with Florida license plates, and the user asserted that they were "dead serious." The tip also matched the description of a suspicious car by a Brown University faculty member, prompting officials to go after the vehicle.

After chasing down the car, the man was later arrested and identified as the shooter– a 48-year-old man, Claudio Neves Valente, who had studied at the university in his younger hears after moving to the US from Portugal.

Then, several days later, his body was found lying in a storage compartment in Salem, New Hampshire. According to an autopsy, he died on Tuesday – three days after the initial shooting on Saturday and just one day after the murder of Loureiro – to suicide before his body was found on Thursday.

Neves Valente's motive is still unclear, but investigations are still ongoing to discover everything about his history and possible biases towards or against certain groups of people.

They have uncovered, though, that Neves Valente was a strong student in physics at Portugal's Instituto Superior Técnico before he came to Brown in 2000. However, he never finished his degree, leaving the university in 2003.

Meanwhile, Loureiro was a classmate of his who had also immigrated from Portugal, suggesting some sort of connection. According to MIT, Loureiro had been thriving at the university, and was quickly rising into a leadership position.

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Image credit to The Providence Journal