Suspect in Brown Shooting Found Dead

The suspect wanted in connection to a mass shooting at Brown University that killed two students and injured nine was found dead in a storage unit in Salem, N.H., authorities said at a news conference Thursday night.

They identified Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, as the man they say barged into an engineering classroom at Brown last Saturday and opened fire on students attending a review session. Valente died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“We are 100 percent confident that this is our target and that this case is closed from a perspective of pursuing people involved,” Rhode Island attorney general Peter Nerhona said.

Officials said they believed Valente was also connected to the murder of MIT nuclear physicist Nuno Loureiro earlier in the week. The same rental car had been spotted near Brown and outside Loureiro’s home, authorities said.

Loureiro was shot at his home Monday night and died at the hospital the next day. His home in Brookline, Mass., is about 50 miles from Brown. Authorities said that in the 1990s, Valente had attended the same university in Lisbon as Loureiro.

Brown President Christina Paxson said at the press conference that Valente had been a student at Brown in the early 2000s but withdrew. She noted that he was a physics student and had likely spent a lot of time in the Barus and Holley science building, where Saturday’s shooting took place.

Valente entered the U.S. in 2000 on a student visa, officials said; he became a lawful permanent resident in 2017.

This is a developing story.