A man identified as the perpetrator of the tragic shootings that claimed the lives of two Brown University students and an MIT professor had reportedly been planning the violent acts for multiple semesters, as per information disclosed by the U.S. Department of Justice on Tuesday. Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown student and Portuguese national, was discovered deceased in a New Hampshire storage facility following the shooting spree that left two students dead and nine others injured at an engineering building on December 13. Two days later, he fatally shot MIT Prof. Nuno F.G. Loureiro at his residence in Brookline, a Boston suburb.
According to Justice Department officials, a search of the storage facility where Neves Valente was found led to the recovery of an electronic device containing a series of brief videos recorded by him post the shootings. In these recordings, the shooter confessed in Portuguese that he had meticulously planned the Brown University attack without specifying the motivation behind targeting Brown or the MIT professor.
Neves Valente expressed no remorse in the videos, stating that he intended to end his life on his own terms and complained about sustaining an eye injury during the shootings. He emphasized that he had no intentions of being the one to suffer the most from the events. The shooter also mentioned an encounter with a witness at Brown University that eventually led to his identification by law enforcement days later.
Having arrived in the United States about 25 years ago to pursue physics studies at Brown, Neves Valente stated he held no strong feelings towards the country or any other places he had resided. Despite studying at Brown on a student visa and later obtaining legal permanent residence status, he expressed a sense of detachment towards the places he had lived.