On Saturday, December 13, Brown University students inside a first floor classroom of the Barus and Holley building were attacked by a gunman. The building is home to the University’s Engineering and Physics departments, where there are fewer cameras than other areas of the campus.
The gunman was masked and holding a 9mm handgun, which are legal to possess for screened people above 21. The FBI was not able to apprehend the gunman for six days, and posted a $50,000 reward to whoever was able to provide helpful information to identify the gunman.
Two undergraduate students at Brown were killed with nine others injured. The victims were Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov. Cook was a sophomore at Brown, engaged in the University’s Republican association and interested in pursuing French and Francophone studies. Umurzokov was a first-semester student from Uzbekistan who dreamed of becoming a neurosurgeon. Both students had promising futures ahead of them because of their intelligence and passion towards their respective fields.
Five days after the victims were released to the public, an anonymous man known as “John” gave law enforcement information about the shooter. ‘John’ had seen the perpetrator, Claudio Neves Valente, several times before the attack, and posted on Reddit about a rental grey Nissan. This tip allowed the FBI to narrow their search to this vehicle, and they were able to find a car with Florida plates that matched the description.
Accessing over 70 street cameras, they found the car parked outside a rental storage unit in New Hampshire on December 18. Inside was the perpetrator, who had taken his own life. He had left behind two 9mm handguns and magazines with details similar to his attacks, confirming the tip from ‘John’. Autopsy reports revealed that he had died two days prior to the discovery.
Later, it was revealed that John was a janitor who worked at the school, and he had noticed Valente several hours before the attack in the school wearing inappropriate clothing for the weather.
Two days prior to the discovery, an MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro, was shot and killed outside his apartment in Massachusetts. Loureiro was the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Centre and was also awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers.
Valente has a history with Loureiro, since they both studied in Portugal at Instituto Superior Técnico, and his motive is supposedly revenge. However, since Valente is dead, law enforcement have not been able to come to a solid conclusion about the motive for his attack. Valente is also a former PhD student at Brown who studied Physics from 2000-2001, which is an important part of his intent for the attack. Officials back up this claim by asserting how he was able to evade the University’s cameras by choosing an older part of the building that was scarce in them.
His only close friend from his time at Brown, Scott Watson, now a physics professor at Syracuse University, said “‘He hated Brown and he hated Providence.’”
