(New York) The day after the police discovered the body of the man suspected of having killed two students at the American Brown University and a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), his motivations remained to be clarified.
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“I think there are a lot of unknowns,” Peter Neronha, attorney general for the state of Rhode Island, where Brown is located, said at a news conference Thursday evening.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, came to the United States from Portugal 25 years ago to study physics at Brown – but did not graduate, according to the university.
This Florida resident ended his life with a gun while hiding in a storage container in Salem, New Hampshire.
PHOTO ARCHIVES AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
This surveillance video image shows Claudio Neves Valente at an Alamo car rental location in Boston, Massachusetts, picking up a rental car on November 17, 2025.
The man first opened fire Saturday in Brown’s engineering and physics building, where exams were being held. Two students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, died and nine others were injured.
Two days later, he traveled to the Boston, Massachusetts, area, some 50 miles away, to the home of a renowned MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro, killing the man with whom he had studied as a youth.
“Best in class”
Portuguese media Espresso reports that Mr Valente, originally from Torres Novas in central Portugal, and Mr Loureiro, aged 47, attended the same engineering school in Lisbon, the Instituto Superior Técnico, in the second half of the 1990s.
“Most of his classmates have no memory of the student Claudio Valente, apart from the fact that he was the best in the class,” the president of the establishment, Rogério Colaço, told this media.
On the contrary, Mr. Loureiro — who taught nuclear science and engineering as well as physics — maintained connections with his professors through his work, he added.
In the days following the incident, investigators appeared to have difficulty coming up with any actionable leads, prompting a barrage of criticism, including from US President Donald Trump of Brown’s video surveillance system.
On social media, images of a man briefly arrested — as well as a namesake — were widely shared.
Conspiracy theories involving a Palestinian Brown student have been pushed by anonymous and right-wing accounts, including podcast host Tim Pool and billionaire Bill Ackman.
Internet users also tried to reconstruct, using artificial intelligence, the faces of the people sought by investigators, complicating their work.
” Disinformation ”
Col. Darnell Weaver, superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police, said Thursday that “the endless avalanche of misinformation, rumors, leaks and hype articles has not helped this investigation.”
PHOTO TAYLOR COESTER, REUTERS ARCHIVES
Law enforcement cordoned off an area of Providence as the manhunt continued for the Brown University shooter on December 15, 2025.
“Distractions and unfounded criticism do not make this work easier. They complicate it and threaten to destroy the justice we seek,” he added.
However, it was a message from a forum on the Reddit platform – encouraging the police to take an interest in a gray Nissan SUV – which made it possible to make the link between the Brown and MIT killings and to resolve these cases on the sixth day of the investigation.
An informant called “John” by law enforcement later came forward to tell them about an encounter with a suspicious man in Brown before the murders.
Authorities revealed that Mr. Valente took elaborate measures to conceal his identity, including using fake license plates and a hard-to-trace cellphone.
