MIT Professor, a Former Classmate, Also Killed
The suspect in the mass shooting at the prestigious Brown University in the United States, as well as the suspect in the murder of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor, has been found dead.
According to foreign media reports on December 18 (local time), local investigative authorities discovered the body of Claudiu Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national and the suspect in both cases, in a storage warehouse in New Hampshire. Investigators stated, "It appears that Valente took his own life with a firearm," and added, "It is possible that a considerable amount of time had passed since his death."
Warehouse where the suspect of the mass shooting at Brown University in the United States was found dead. Photo by AFP Yonhap News
On the afternoon of December 13, Valente entered a classroom in the Barus and Holley building on the Brown University campus in Providence, Rhode Island, and carried out a mass shooting.
As a result of this incident, two students were killed: Ella Cook, 19, vice president of the Republican student organization at Brown University, and Muhammad Aziz Amurzhokov, 18, a freshman from Uzbekistan. Nine others were injured.
Two days after the Brown University shooting, on the night of December 15, Nuno Loureiro, 47, a renowned expert in nuclear fusion and a professor at MIT as well as director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was shot at his home in a three-story apartment building in Brookline, Massachusetts. He died at the hospital the following day. Brookline is located about 80 kilometers north of Providence.
Valente was an undergraduate classmate of the late Professor Loureiro, having studied together in the Department of Physics at Instituto Superior T?cnico in Lisbon, Portugal, from 1995 to 2000. Valente entered Brown University as a doctoral student in the Department of Physics in the fall of 2000 on an F1 student visa but took a leave of absence in the spring of 2001 and did not return, ultimately withdrawing in 2003. He obtained U.S. permanent residency in September 2017 through the "DV1" diversity visa lottery program, and his last known residence was in Miami, Florida.
Valente traveled from Boston, Massachusetts, to Rhode Island in a rental car, and evidence confirmed that the car remained on the outskirts of Brown University. After leaving Rhode Island, Valente moved to Massachusetts and then attempted to evade tracking by attaching a fake Maine license plate to the rental car.
Peter Neronha, Attorney General of Rhode Island, stated that while the suspect's identity has been confirmed, "there is still much we do not know" regarding the motive. He added, "We do not know why it happened now, why it was Brown University, why these students, or why this classroom."
Meanwhile, Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), announced in a social media post on the night of December 18 that, following President Donald Trump's directive, the DV1 program would be suspended. The DV1 program, also known as the Diversity Visa Program, grants permanent residency to up to 50,000 people per year from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States through a lottery system. The Trump administration has previously expressed its intention to abolish the DV1 program.
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