Claudio Neves Valente, 48, who is believed to have killed two students at Brown University in Providence, R.I., on Saturday and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor in his home in Brookline, Mass., on Monday, has been found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire, law enforcement said.
The Providence police chief said that Valente died from a self-inflicted gun wound, and the Rhode Island attorney general said that “a lot of unknowns remain,” and “we don’t know why now, why Brown, why these students and why this classroom,” the Associated Press reported.
A native of Portugal, Valente studied physics in graduate school at Brown from 2000 to 2001 but had no “current affiliation with the university,” according to the Brown president.
According to an affidavit in support of an application for a criminal complaint against Valente, the Portuguese national was a permanent U.S. resident who was believed to live in Miami.
A car that Valente rented in Boston showed up on license plate readers about a mile from the Brown campus from Dec. 1 to 12, according to the affidavit. On Dec. 14, the same Google email account that Valente provided when he checked into a Boston hotel was used near Boston University, according to the FBI.
The FBI added in the affidavit that Valente put a Maine license plate over that of the rental car. “Maine law enforcement has determined that the license plate is unregistered and not valid,” it said.
The U.S. attorney for Massachusetts said that Valente was part of the same program at a Portuguese university from 1995 to 2000 as was Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor he is believed to have shot to death, the AP reported.
The two students killed at Brown are Ella Cook of Alabama and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov of Virginia.
