A man suspected in the shooting at Brown University this weekend that killed two people and injured nine committed suicide Thursday night, authorities said.
The man was discovered dead at a storage facility on Thursday evening. and is also believed to have killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor at his Boston-area home, the AP said, citing a law enforcement official.
The US Attorney’s Office for the District of New Hampshire put forth a press release indicating that the Brown shooter and MIT professor’s killer were the same person. “The shooter is deceased and there is no longer a threat to the public,” the brief press release said.
“He took his own life tonight,” Oscar Perez, chief of the Providence, Rhode Island, police department, said at a press conference.
Perez identified the man as Claudio Neves Valente, 48. Authorities believe that he acted alone. Peter Neronha, the attorney general of Rhode Island, said the suspect obtained lawful permanent resident status in September 2017.
Neronha said Neves Valente was found dead with a bag, and two firearms, as well as evidence in the car “that matches exactly what we see at the scene here in Providence”.
Neronha told reporters that a person with information about the suspected shooter played a key role in finding him. After officials publicized a photo of the suspect some 24 hours ago, an individual “came forward to two Providence police officers over on the east side and said he had information that he was that person and that he had information that could help this case”.
“He blew this case right open,” Neronha said at a press conference. “He blew it open.”
The person’s information led authorities to a vehicle that helped them find a name, “which led us to the photographs of that individual renting the car, which matched the clothing of our shooter here in Providence, that matched the satchel”, Neronha explained.
Neronha said that the suspect tried to evade law enforcement by changing license plates.
“This guy was changing plates was one of the reason,” he said. “He knew what he was doing … we got a main plate and we’ve got a Florida plate on the same car.”
Brown University president Christina Paxson said that Valente had been enrolled at Brown from fall 2000 to spring 2001 as a graduate student in physics. He took a leave of absence in April 2001 and formally withdrew in 2003 and “has no current affiliation with the university”, Paxson said.
Physics classes typically require access to special equipment, Paxson said, which was located in the building where the shooting took place.
Ted Docks, FBI special agent in charge of Boston, told reporters that authorities thought the suspect attended the same university in Lisbon as the MIT professor.
Confirmation of the suspected shooter’s death comes hours after dozens of law enforcement agents convened on a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire. Shortly before 8pm, journalist Eli Sherman reported: “Multiple law enforcement officials carrying weapons and wearing full tactical gear” entered the storage facility.
The manhunt for the shooter had started afresh on Monday morning after the state’s attorney general announced that a person of interest detained on Sunday had been released, a development that Providence mayor Brett Smiley conceded was “likely to cause fresh anxiety for our community”.
Smiley told CNN that while the release of the original person of interest had been a setback, “that didn’t mean that the other pieces of the investigation were stopped or in any way paused”.
The FBI director, Kash Patel, faced criticism on Monday for rushing to social media to celebrate the bureau’s work, only for the person arrested to be freed hours later.
The two students killed were identified by family as Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, an Uzbek national in his first year at Brown. Cook was vice-president of Brown’s College Republicans of America chapter; Umurzokov dreamed of becoming a neurosurgeon.
