The gunman responsible for Saturday’s shooting at Brown University and Monday’s killing of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a New Hampshire storage facility, authorities announced Thursday evening.
The shooter, 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, was a physics graduate student at Brown more than two decades ago. A legal permanent resident from Portugal, Valente was living in Miami before he came to Boston last month, authorities said.
Valente appears to have acted alone and the motive for the killings remains unknown, authorities said.
On Saturday, law enforcement officials added, Valente opened fire in a lecture hall at Brown during an economics study session, killing two and wounding nine. Two days later, he shot and killed MIT professor Nuno Loureiro inside his home in Brookline, about 45 miles north of Brown.
Valente and Loureiro knew one another, authorities said.
Thursday’s discovery ended a five-day search that early on appeared to stump investigators and rattled communities from Providence to Boston. The key breakthrough in the case came on Wednesday, said Peter Neronha, Rhode Island’s attorney general.
Authorities credited much of their progress to a witness who came forward in the past 24 hours and described a series of encounters with Valente before the shooting.
“He blew this case right open,” Peter Neronha said.
The witness was identified in an arrest warrant affidavit made public Thursday evening only as “John.” Investigators said John first encountered Valente in a bathroom at the Barus and Holley building before the shooting.
John described Valente as suspicious, noting his clothing seemed “flimsy” and inappropriate for the cold weather, the affidavit states. The two locked eyes, John reportedly told authorities, saying he “looked at [him] like he knew [him.]”
John followed Valente from the building, where the man approached a gray or silver sedan with Florida plates parked outside the nearby Rhode Island Historical Society building, according to the affidavit.
When he noticed John watching him, authorities said, Valente walked away from the car. John followed Valente and eventually noted him circling back toward the vehicle, switching directions every time they saw each other in what John described to authorities as “a game of cat and mouse,” the arrest affidavit states.
At one point, authorities said, John confronted Valente, demanding to know why he was circling the block when his car was parked outside the Barus and Holley building.
“I don’t know you from nobody,” Valente responded, according to the affidavit. “Why are you harassing me?”
John posted about the encounter on Reddit after the shooting, suggesting police needed to look for the suspicious man’s car. On Wednesday, John approached police officers in Providence to detail the encounter.
“That person led us to the car, which led us to the name, which led us to the photographs of the person renting the car … that matched the clothing that matched the satchel,” Neronha said.
Earlier Thursday evening, a massive law enforcement presence was seen surrounding the storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire. Salem police advised residents to look out for “any individuals on foot who appear out of place, unfamiliar to the area, or behaving in a manner that seems unusual or suspicious.”
By Thursday evening, officers had tracked the suspect to the Extra Space Storage facility in Salem, near the Massachusetts border. News footage from a helicopter showed a large law enforcement presence surrounding the building as officers with long guns appeared to set the stage for a confrontation.
Federal, state and local law enforcement have spent almost a week scouring the region for the gunman, who killed two Brown students and injured nine others at a study session for an economics exam on Saturday afternoon. The prolonged search sent thousands of scared students home and cast a pall over Providence, a tight-knit city where gun violence is rare.
In most mass shootings in the United States, suspects are either killed or captured quickly, making the violence at Brown stand out.
Each day during the manhunt, local news conferences have become more contentious as police provided bare-bones updates and asked for the public’s help identifying blurred images of a person of interest.
Frustration grew after police briefly detained a person of interest Sunday before releasing him without charges, saying their evidence showed he was not the shooter.
Witnesses have told The Washington Post that a man dressed all in black, his face covered, burst into a lecture hall where the study session was wrapping up around 4 p.m. Saturday. He yelled something unintelligible and opened fire. Students spent the night locked down in dorms and university buildings, barricading themselves and trying to find out if anyone they knew had been shot or killed.
The two slain students were Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama who was studying math and French, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a freshman from Virginia who was an aspiring brain surgeon.
Emily Davies, Susan Svrluga, María Luisa Paúl and Todd Wallack contributed to this report.
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