By MES Dispatch staff
The Briefing
- Salem, N.H. — The suspect in the Brown University mass shooting and the killing of an MIT professor was found dead in a storage unit; officials say he died by suicide. Police1+1
- Suspect: Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown graduate student and Portuguese national. Investigators say he acted alone. Police1
- Victims: Two Brown students were killed and nine wounded on campus; MIT Prof. Nuno F. G. Loureiro was fatally shot two days later in Brookline, Mass. Police1+1
- Break in case: A tipster on Reddit recognized Valente; license-plate readers and surveillance video then traced his movements to New Hampshire. Police1
SALEM, N.H. — Authorities say a multi-state manhunt ended Thursday night when the prime suspect in the Dec. 13mass shooting at Brown University—also accused in the Dec. 15 killing of MIT physics professor Nuno F. G. Loureiro—was discovered dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire. An autopsy indicates he died two days before his body was found. Police1+1
Officials identified the suspect as Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown graduate student and Portuguese national. Investigators believe he acted alone, first opening fire inside Brown’s engineering complex—killing two students and wounding nine—and later shooting Loureiro at the professor’s Brookline home. Police1+1
The break came after police released surveillance images of a person of interest. A witness who had seen Valente near the scene posted their suspicion on Reddit and alerted authorities. Investigators then leveraged license-plate recognitionand additional video to track a Florida-plated rental car that later displayed a Maine plate overlay, following the route from Rhode Island to Massachusetts and finally to the Salem storage facility, where two firearms were recovered, officials said. Police1
Authorities said the motive remains unclear. Brown and MIT leaders mourned the victims—identified as Ella Cook, 19, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, at Brown, and Prof. Loureiro, 47, a renowned fusion scientist—while counseling services and tightened security remained in effect on both campuses. Police1+1
Federal, state, and local agencies continue processing evidence tied to both crime scenes and the New Hampshire discovery site. Officials said further updates will be released as the investigation closes remaining gaps in the timeline. Police1