The gunman who opened fire in a Brown University classroom on December 13 was found dead by suicide in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire three days after the shooting. He has been identified as 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a former Brown student born in Portugal.
Neves Valente is also implicated in the murder of an MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro, who attended the same university in Portugal. The two were both in the physics program and reportedly knew each other. Security footage shows Neves Valente entering Loureiro’s apartment building shortly before he was fatally shot around 8:30 p.m., the day after the Brown shooting. Authorities are unsure of how the crimes are connected, and no clear motive has been identified.
Shortly after the initial shooting, authorities arrested a suspect and found two firearms in his hotel room. However, DNA found at the scene was not a match, and the man was released for a lack of evidence.
Mass shooters typically do not go unidentified for long, and law enforcement faced enormous pressure to identify the gunman. In the end, the key came in the form of a Reddit post by a person who has been coined “John.” John came face-to-face with Neves Valente in a bathroom at Brown two hours before the shooting. Noticing that his clothing seemed unsuited to the weather, John followed the man outside, where he went to his car but then circled the block in a cat-and-mouse fashion.
After the shooting, John’s post urged authorities to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates. The tip led them to a rental car that had been seen in the area for days leading up to the shooting; it was also spotted in Massachusetts, where Loureiro was murdered. This information eventually led investigators to the storage unit where Neves Valente was found dead.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley is urging the FBI to award John the full $50,000 award for his invaluable help with the investigation.
Neves Valente was the top student in the physics program at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal in the 1990s. He was enrolled in a PhD program at Brown in 2000 but only attended for a year. He reappeared in 2017, when he moved to the US through a visa lottery program. The next time he resurfaced, he was brandishing a gun in the building where he undoubtedly took many classes as a grad student.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that the visa program that Neves Valente used to enter the country is being indefinitely suspended. Legal experts warn that this is unlikely to fall within the executive branch’s scope: Congress established the program, so the president cannot abolish it. This response is similar to Trump’s halting of all asylum reports from Afghanistan after an Afghan shot two national guard members in Washington last month.
