Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national and one-time Brown physics student, was found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility, officials said.
Brown research associate Ulbiya Chisty left her College Hill apartment today — the first time she’s been out since Saturday’s campus shooting. Chisty, 24, who is also a Brown graduate, said she lives around the block from the site of the attack that killed two people and wounded nine others.
“I’ve been terrified,” she said. “The only time I left was to go throw out my trash.”
“I can see the crime tape from my house,” she added.
Christy said she forced herself to leave the house today to complete errands on nearby Thayer Street.
“I realized that I can’t stop living my life or achieving my goals or taking care of my responsibilities because of the fear that’s trying to be instilled,” she said.
The ATF and FBI today said that tests show that the two guns found with the body of the suspected gunman were used in the Brown University shooting and the killing of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro.
Claudio Manuel Neves Valente used one of the guns in Saturday’s deadly shooting at Brown University, and the other in the subsequent killing of Loureiro in Massachusetts, the agencies said in a statement.
Shell casings and bullets were tested, and the two firearms were “positively correlated” to each shooting, one gun used in each, they said.
“Additionally, a rapid DNA test has preliminarily matched Neves Valente with DNA recovered from evidence at Brown University,” the ATF and FBI said.
Neves Valente was found dead yesterday in a New Hampshire storage facility, apparently from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, officials have said.
Kavya Mohan, a Brown alumna who lives in Providence, said that while she feels closure now that the suspected shooter is dead, the end of the manhunt “definitely does not necessarily make things completely OK again.”
“I really do hope that I can see the university the way I used to,” said Mohan, 28. “Hopefully, we will heal from this phase, and hopefully, there will be better days ahead for the entire Brown community.”
Ulbiya Chisty, an alum and researcher, said she’s still trying to make sense of the last week.
“We’re still all just trying to process the fact that, you know, the person has been caught had gone to Brown at one point,” she said. “A lot of people are thinking about the motives. Why would someone have done this?”
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha praised “John” for coming forward with information that helped law enforcement crack the case.
“He was a great, ” he said.
John posted in a Reddit thread about his encounter on Saturday with the suspect after bumping into him in a bathroom inside the Barus and Holley building at Brown. He later met with investigators and provided them with crucial details about the suspect’s car.
“He confronted that person, had some sort of discussion between the two of them. The person leaves, and at some point, John finds him on Benevolent Street and encounters him again,” Col. Oscar Perez, Providence Police Department Chief, said.
Security video released by officials showed John chasing after the suspect.
“That’s when you see the suspect of interest … running away and John chasing him, actually passes him and confronts him,” the chief said.
According to Perez, the suspect told John that he was harassing him and John left.
Just blocks from campus, the normally bustling Thayer Street remained a ghost town this evening.
The few people making their way up and down the street suggested that Providence is as mystified as the rest of America about the identity of the tipster who helped crack the case and identified the shooting suspect.
This afternoon on the Brown campus, caution tape still surrounds the engineering building. Camera crews, police and decaying floral bouquets stand in place of nervous students shuffling in and out of final exams.
The shooting suspect was enrolled as a graduate student in Brown’s physics program in 2000 and likely would have been familiar with the building that housed the lecture hall where two students were killed and nine others were wounded in Saturday’s violence.
The New Hampshire Department of Justice Office of the Chief Medical Examiner announced it performed an autopsy this morning on the body of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the suspect in the Brown University shooting and the killing of an MIT professor.
The examination confirmed that Neves Valente died as a result of a gunshot wound to the head and that his manner of death was suicide, the statement said.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or chat live at 988lifeline.org. You can also visit SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for additional support.
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley released photos from behind the scenes of the search for the Brown University shooter.
“Much of this work happened out of public view,” Smiley wrote in an X post. “These officers and investigators do not seek recognition, but through their vigilance, professionalism and focus during moments when our city is hurting most, they showed us what real heroes look like.”
“I am deeply grateful for their service and could not be prouder of how they showed up for our community when it mattered most,” he said.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said the suspect had the attacks “very well planned out” and tried to elude law enforcement.
The suspect used voice over internet protocol, which allows a person to make calls over the internet instead of a traditional cellphone service; did not use “traditional credit cards”; and was changing the license plate on his rental car, Neronha said.
Col. Oscar Perez, chief of the Providence Police Department, said law enforcement had to “go back to the old-fashioned way of policing.”
“Which was interviewing individuals, reviewing hundreds of videos and footage,” he said. “This individual was strategic in every way, using apps to communicate, changing plates on vehicles, covering his face, the clothing that he used, the areas that he drove into. It was a lot of work, but I had put full faith in the team that I work with.”
Neronha said it’s believed that the suspect used two different firearms in the attacks, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is comparing the ballistics.
Despite the suspect’s attempts to cover his tracks, the attorney general said law enforcement was able to track down the suspect one day after learning his name.
A Brown University student who was the subject of false online rumors saying he was involved in the school shooting — rumors that had no basis in fact, law enforcement officials told NBC News — is speaking out today.
Mustapha Kharbouch says the “past few days have been an unimaginable nightmare” as he was named by online influencers as a possible suspect.
“The past few days have been an unimaginable nightmare,” Kharbouch said in a statement today. “I woke up on Tuesday morning to unfounded, vile, Islamophobic, and anti-Palestinian accusations being directed toward me online.”
“Instead of grieving with my community in the aftermath of the horrible shooting, I received non-stop death threats and hate speech,” he said. “This is, however, nothing compared to the ongoing acts of genocide against Palestinians living in occupied Gaza and the West Bank. But it is a story every Arab, Muslim, Palestinian, and marginalized person knows all too well — we should not live in a world where this is acceptable or normal.”
“I refuse to be silenced by anyone who comes after me for my identity and advocacy for Palestinians — a people I happen to owe my entire existence to,” Kharbouch said. “Even in this nightmare, I have been flooded with incredible messages of support from friends, faculty, staff, and strangers alike, and it is because of them that I continue to have faith in a world that stands up against all forms of racism.”
A senior law enforcement official briefed on the investigation says the question on the motive of the Brown University and MIT professor shootings remains an open one. As of today, no writings or messages have been found or appear to have been left behind by the suspect.
The official says that the investigation is very much ongoing and continues to process evidence.
Two senior law enforcement officials say that the initial ballistics comparison between the MIT professor shooting and the Brown shooting don’t match, so they’re trying to determine if two firearms were used and what firearms the suspect had.
As detailed by the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts and in court documents, the efforts by Claudio Manuel Neves Valente to elude law enforcement were significant.
She says that he used a Google cellphone with possibly a foreign SIM card, which would have made it difficult to get real-time cellphone data and information. As NBC News has reported, he used different license plates in an effort to evade license plate reader technology, creating a Maine license plate based on a now-out-of-registration Maine plate.
The arrest affidavit out of Providence indicates that he tried to change his rental return location from Boston to Hartford and Bradley Airport, but investigators are looking into whether that was just a decoy for police.
Edward Pol, who lived near Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, said he used to see the suspect driving in the area and outside in his yard, but never spoke to him.
Pol told NBC South Florida that he recognized Neves Valente from the news.
“All we had was the video footage with him with his mask on. But after I started seeing his face over and over on the TV this morning, yes, I definitely seen him around here,” he said outside of his Miami home.
He said the last time he saw his neighbor was about two months ago.
Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national, was admitted to the U.S. as an F-1 student in 2000 to attend a graduate program at Brown. In a 2017 lottery, he received a “diversity immigrant visa” as part of a program “specifically for aliens from countries with lower rates of admission as immigrants to the United States,” the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ website says.
He was granted lawful permanent resident status the same year, a Providence police detective wrote in an affidavit.
Pol said he believes there needs to be more vetting of people who come through the program.
“We need to get better about what we’re doing,” he told NBC South Florida.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she is directing a pause to the program.
President Donald Trump suspended the green card lottery program on Thursday that allowed the suspect in the Brown University and MIT shootings to come to the United States from Portugal.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a post on the social platform X that, at Trump’s direction, she was ordering U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to pause the program.
The diversity visa allows people from countries with lower immigration to the U.S. and few other options — no family ties or an employer to sponsor them — to apply to come to the U.S. and get a green card. The visa is given out through a computerized lottery process, but to participate, applicants have to meet eligibility criteria and pass security screening.
The State Department annually issues a list of countries whose citizens are eligible. Those include Botswana, Morocco, Denmark, Finland, Ukraine, Argentina, Barbados, Cuba and many more. Portugal is also on the list.
Only 55,000 diversity visas are available each year. Michelle Mittelstadt, a spokeswoman for the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration policy think tank, said millions apply every year for the few green cards.
A statement of probable cause from the FBI released today provides a detailed timeline of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente’s movements leading up to the shooting at Brown and the killing of the MIT professor.
The MIT professor who was shot and killed went to the same university in Portugal at the same time as the suspect in his killing, the university confirms.
Nuno Loureiro, who was found fatally shot in his Boston-area home, and the suspect, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, went to the University of Lisbon’s school of engineering and technology, the Instituto Superior Técnico, from 1995 to 2000, the university said in a statement.
Claudio Neves Valente. U.S. Attorney’s Office Massachusetts
The university called Loureiro a “brilliant colleague” and said its community is “deeply distressed by his premature passing.”
The suspect in Saturday’s shooting at Brown University and the fatal shooting of an MIT professor days later is dead, law enforcement officials said Thursday night.
Authorities found the suspect, Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, dead with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage facility in New Hampshire.
The discovery marked the end of a five-day manhunt that began after two students were killed and nine more injured at Brown.
The man suspected of killing two students and wounding nine others in a shooting at Brown University before fatally shooting a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor days later was found dead today in a New Hampshire storage unit, officials said.
Claudio Neves Valente. Providence Police
The suspect, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, died by suicide, Providence, Rhode Island, Police Chief Oscar Perez told reporters Thursday.
Valente, who is also accused of killing an MIT professor days after the Rhode Island campus shooting, was found in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, roughly 80 miles north of Providence, that authorities had obtained warrants to search, said Ted Docks, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Boston field office.
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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said tonight she is directing a pause to a “diversity immigrant visa” program after it was revealed the Brown shooting suspect had received one in the past.
Valente, 48, a Portuguese national, got the visa in a lottery in 2017, a Providence police detective wrote in an affidavit.
He was granted lawful permanent resident status the same year, the affidavit says.
Valente was admitted to the U.S. as an F-1 student in 2000 to attend a graduate program at Brown, the affidavit states.
“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program,” Noem wrote on X.
USCIS is an acronym for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service.
Congress passed the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program as part of the Immigration Act of 1990.
The purpose was for a program “specifically for aliens from countries with lower rates of admission as immigrants to the United States,” USCIS says on its website.
President George H.W. Bush signed the Immigration Act of 1990 into law. The law, which passed with bipartisan support, also established a program for skilled workers and temporary protected status for people from countries affected by disasters or wars.
The two Brown University students killed in a mass shooting Saturday were identified as Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook.
Umurzokov, 18, was from Uzbekistan, in central Asia, and “had a bright future” ahead of him, said his aunt Karina Gabit, who described him as “very kind” and smart.
Cook, 19, from Birmingham, Alabama, was remembered by her church there as “an incredible, grounded, faithful, bright light” who encouraged those around her.
Six of the nine people wounded in Saturday’s attack are still at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence and listed as stable, officials said, as of Thursday afternoon. The three others have been released.
Read the full story here.
The suspect in the Brown University and MIT professor shootings had rented a hotel room and a car in Boston and drove to Rhode Island on Dec. 1, the U.S. attorney in Boston said.
U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley laid out the following timeline at a news conference tonight, as alleged.
The suspect, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, rents a Nissan Sentra in Boston and drives to the vicinity of Brown University.
His car is “observed intermittently” between Dec. 1 and Dec. 12.
Valente opens fire at the physics building at Brown University, during a study session, killing two people and wounding nine others.
Between Dec. 13 and Dec. 14, Valente returns to Massachusetts.
Valente is accused of killing MIT physics professor Nuno Loureiro at Loureiro’s home in Brookline, a city just outside Boston.
Valente then switches the plates to an unregistered plate out of Maine.
“Immediately following Professor Loureiro’s murder, Neves Valente drove to a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire,” Foley said.
Valente had rented the storage unit in Salem, which is around 40 miles away by car, in November, she said.
Valente’s body is found in the storage unit.
A Salem Police Department cruiser drives past the storage facility where Claudio Neves Valente's body was found in Salem, N.H. Ging Guan / AFP – Getty Images
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