The alleged gunman suspected of fatally shooting two Brown University students followed by a professor at MIT appears to have spent years plotting the attacks, to which he confessed in videos discovered be federal investigators.
Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown student and Portuguese national, is accused of killing two students and wounding nine others on the Rhode Island campus on Dec. 13. Just two days later, he crossed state lines into Massachusetts and fatally shot 47-year-old science professor Nuno F. Loureiro at his home in the Boston suburb of Brookline.
Neves Valente was found dead by apparent suicide on Dec. 18 inside a storage facility he rented in New Hampshire.
In an update on Tuesday, officials with the Justice Department said a subsequent search of that facility turned up videos in which the suspect admitted he’d been “planning the Brown University shooting for a long time.”
The alleged gunman, who recorded the videos in Portuguese in the days after the shootings, had attended school with Loureiro in Portugal decades ago, though it’s unclear if the men had a relationship or what motive he may have had for killing him.
Neves Valente also offered no explanation for the shootings at Brown, but said his “only objective was to leave more or less” on his “own terms” and to ensure he “wouldn’t be the one who ended up suffering the most from all of this.”
According to investigators, “Neves Valente showed no remorse” in the videos, and instead “blamed innocent, unarmed children for their deaths at his hand.” He also complained about an eye injury he suffered when he shot Loureiro at close range.
“I am not going to apologize because during my lifetime no one sincerely apologized to me,” Neves Valente said in one of the clips, according to transcripts released by the DOJ.
He said that he’d been renting the storage unit for three years and spent at least “six semesters” thinking about his impending shooting spree. He called his execution of the murders “a little incompetent,” but said “at least something was done.”
An investigation in the shootings remains ongoing.
With News Wire Services
