On December 13, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, opened fire inside the engineering building on the campus of Brown University, killing two people and wounding nine others. How he got into the building was initially a mystery, though the school later said it was open for finals. Some students have contradicted that account from the President Christina Paxson, adding that the Barus and Holley Building had been accessible for weeks before exams. Whatever the case, Valente scoped out the building for weeks, based on an account from a custodian.
After the shooting, Valente shot and killed MIT professor and former classmate Nuno F.G. Loureiro two days later at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. He later traveled to Salem, New Hampshire, where he rented a storage unit and committed suicide, likely on the same day. His body was discovered on December 18. Inside the unit, investigators discovered tapes they hoped would point to a motive. There isn’t a solid one yet, but Valente held no ill will toward the United States, of which he was a permanent resident. The tapes reveal a rambling, angry man who planned this attack for months, showed no remorse for what he was about to do, and said he had chickened out on multiple occasions. One basis for his resentment is the lack of an apology; he never received one in his lifetime.
“The world cannot be redeemed,” he said.
Brown was the target, but we don’t know much more than that as to why he focused his apparent deep-seated anger on the school, of which he was an alumnus (via NBC News):
The man suspected of killing two students at Brown University and fatally shooting a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor days later recorded a series of short videos after the violence that provided no clear motive and suggested he’d spent significant time planning, federal officials said Tuesday.
In transcripts of the videos released by the U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts, Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, said he did not hate the United States and complained about an eye injury that he said he suffered from a shell round. He appeared to say he had been planning the violence for at least six semesters, and he said no one had ever sincerely apologized to him in his lifetime.
[…]
The four videos were recovered from the New Hampshire storage unit where Neves Valente was found dead on Dec. 18, the prosecutor's office said in a statement.
Authorities said he opened fire inside a Brown auditorium on Dec. 13, wounding nine students and killing two — Ella Cook, 19, an Alabama native and vice president of a college Republican group, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, a native of Uzbekistan who relatives said dreamed of becoming a neurosurgeon.
[…]
The U.S. attorney’s office said an initial review of evidence showed Neves Valente targeted Brown, but it did not provide a motive for that shooting or that of Loureiro.
"Neves Valente showed no remorse during the recordings; on the contrary, he exposed his true nature when he blamed innocent, unarmed children for their deaths at his hand and grumbled about a self-inflicted injury he suffered when he shot the MIT professor at close range," the office said in a statement.
Rhode Island's attorney general credited a Reddit user who encountered Neves Valente at Brown and posted about it with providing crucial clues that helped authorities track him to the storage unit where he was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
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No motive yet. There might not be one that’s rational. Sounds like an angry man who reached his breaking point—who knows. It’s not like the series of audio tapes Marvin Heemeyer left before he retrofitted steel plating over a tractor and went on a rampage in the town of Granby, Colorado, in 2004. He killed himself during the assault, but the audio tapes he left behind provided a clear motive. Heemeyer got off on the wrong foot when he purchased land to build a muffler shop, which quickly ran afoul of local zoning laws. He blamed the landed establishment of the locals, whom he called the good ole’ boys, specifically the Thompson family, who held immense local sway due to their businesses dominating the area.
I don’t think we’re going to find much resolution here with the Brown shooter. A homeless man named “John” was the one who confronted Valente, followed him to his rental car, where he got the model, make, and tags, and later posted this on Reddit. That’s what cracked the case.
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