Providence Police work the scene of a shooting in the area of Eddy Street and Sayles Street in Providence, Rhode Island, United States December 15, 2025.
Kyle Mazza | Anadolu | Getty Images
The man suspected of the shooting at Brown University that killed two students and injured nine others last Saturday, and then of killing a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor days later, was found dead from suicide on Thursday, authorities said.
“There’s no longer a threat to the public,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston said in a statement.
The suspect in the shootings was identified as Claudio Manuel Nueves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national who had been a graduate student in physics at Brown in the early 2000s.
Authorities announced his identity and suspected role in the Brown shooting hours after his body was discovered in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, with guns at the scene.
Providence, Rhode Island, police had obtained a warrant for Valente’s arrest charging him with two counts of murder, and multiple assault and firearms counts related to the shooting Saturday afternoon in an auditorium at Brown’s Barus Holley Building, where a group of students were taking an exam review for Principles of Economics.
The MIT professor, Nuno Gomes Loureiro, 47, was found shot in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Monday, and died at a hospital on Tuesday.
Valente had been a PhD program student in physics at Brown.
He is believed to have attended the same university in Lisbon, Portugal, as Loureiro, who was a member of MIT’s departments of nuclear science and engineering and physics.
Valente is the “individual we believe responsible for the Brown shooting,” FBI Special-Agent-in-Charge Ted Docks said at a press conference in Providence.
“Many questions need to be answered,” Docks said.
Authorities believe Valente acted alone and that he eluded capture for days because he was traveling in a rental car whose license plates he kept changing.
But authorities managed to track the rental, which was originally made in Boston, and were able to identify Valente through that, and to learn that he had rented the storage unit in Salem where he was found.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said, “It is safe to assume that this man, when he was a student, spent a lot of time in that building,” Barus Holley, where Saturday’s shooting occurred.
The last class he took at Brown was in 2001.
Authorities said he is believed to have originally been in the United States on a student visa and obtained lawful permanent resident status in 2017
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