Crucial potential clues to Claudio Neves Valente’s deadly mass shooting at Brown University and his murder of an MIT professor two days later date as far back 30 years and to another country.
While the motive behind the Portuguese national’s reign of terror was still unclear Friday, a day after he was found dead by suicide, the 48-year-old gunman had past connections to both the leafy Ivy League school and slain nuclear science professor Nuno Loureiro.
Neves Valente first opened fire inside a university lecture hall at Brown on Saturday, killing two promising students and wounding nine more, before traveling roughly 50 miles and fatally gunning down the 47-year-old Loureiro two days later, police said.
The killer and Loureiro first crossed paths between 1995 and 2000 at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal when Neves Valente and the MIT professor took the same course, authorities and the school said.
“My understanding is that they did know each other,” said US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Leah Foley at a Thursday press conference, according to CBS News.
Neves Valente then entered the United States in 2000 on an F-1 student visa, beginning his enrollment at Brown in a doctoral program in fall 2000.
But his tenure at the elite college was short-lived.
He took a leave of absence in spring 2001 and then officially exited the school in July 2003. Officials stressed he had no current ties to the school.
The crazed gunman ended up notching his lawful US permanent residency more than a decade later, in April 2017.
Here’s the latest on the mass shooting at Brown University
In the weeks leading up to his pair of shootings, he rented a storage unit in Salem, NH, in November, and also rented a Boston hotel room near the end of the month.
He rented a gray Nissan Sentra with Florida plates around Dec 1 – a car that was spotted multiple times in the area around Brown’s campus through Dec. 12.
Neves Valente’s streak of violence began Saturday when he shot and killed sophomore Ella Cook and freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, as well as wounded nine more victims, during his deadly classroom spree at Brown, police said.
He switched license plates in the aftermath and then Monday traveled to Brookline to kill Loureiro at the teacher’s home.
The gunman is believed to have been alive and moving around Thursday — before he was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound that night inside the storage facility he rented out, ending the nearly-week manhunt, authorities and CNN reported.
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