The suspect in last weekend’s mass shooting at Brown University, which killed two students and wounded nine others, was found dead Thursday, authorities said, ending a dayslong multistate manhunt. Officials also confirmed he was responsible for the fatal shooting of an MIT professor two days after the Brown attack.
Authorities identified the suspect as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown University graduate student who attended the school roughly 25 years ago.
During a news conference Thursday, officials said Valente died by suicide. His body was discovered inside a storage unit in New Hampshire, where law enforcement located him following an intensive search across several states.
“Tonight our Providence neighbors can finally breathe a little easier,” Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said during the briefing.
Investigators said there is no evidence Valente acted with accomplices. Officials detailed his movements before and after the shootings, noting steps he took to evade authorities while on the run.
A motive for the two shootings has not yet been determined, officials said, though investigators continue to review evidence and background information.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said Valente enrolled in the university’s physics Ph.D. program in 2000, attending for less than a year before taking a leave of absence and later withdrawing. As a physics student, she said, he was believed to have spent significant time in the Barus & Holley engineering building, which was targeted in Saturday’s shooting.
The investigation remains ongoing as authorities work to determine what led to the attacks that unsettled communities across New England for several days.
























