There was a mass shooting at Brown University, with a connection to a different attack involving an MIT professor just two days later last month.
On December 13th, a mass shooting at Brown University shocked the people across the country when a gunman entered an auditorium, during a study session, killing two students and injuring nine others.
During final exams week at Brown, the gunman entered the Barus engineering building and unleashed chaos. The attack was one of the deadliest in Rhode Island history and rattled the Brown community.
Just two days later, 47-year-old MIT Physics professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro was found shot to death in his home in Brookline, an immediate suburb of Boston.
Law enforcement pieced together the timeline and evidence connecting the two shootings through vehicle tracking, surveillance footage, witness tips, and forensic links between the firearms used. This confirmed that the same individual was most likely responsible for both acts of violence. They determined the shooter was Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national and former Brown University graduate student. He was later found dead in a New Hampshire storage unit as a suspected suicide.
Investigators say Valente planned the Brown attack for years and later targeted the MIT professor, whom he had known from academic programs in Portugal. Valente recorded a confession inside a storage unit he rented in Salem, New Hampshire, in the hours before taking his own life. In one of these, Valente said, “I am not going to apologize, because during my lifetime no one sincerely apologized to me.”
The shootings prompted widespread shock and mourning on both campuses and beyond. Brown and MIT communities held vigils and memorials for the victims, and universities reviewed security policies in response to concerns about campus safety.
