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Police investigating the murder of two Brown University students and an MIT professor are looking into the suspect’s failed academic career as a possible motive.
Nearly 25 years after dropping out of a doctoral program at Brown University, 48-year-old Claudio Neves Valente returned to campus to carry out a mass shooting. He killed two students and injured nine others.
Two days later, he travelled 50 miles to MIT and executed a former classmate from Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico.
Investigators announced on Thursday night they believed Valente was responsible for both attacks.
Valente was discovered dead on Thursday in a storage unit in Salam, New Hampshire.
An autopsy revealed the 48-year-old Portuguese national died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head on Tuesday, two days before police found his body.
Inside the storage unit, police also found a satchel with two guns.
So far, investigators have not said what Valente did in the two decades since he left Brown, but they believe his failure to achieve a doctorate could be the key to the murders.
Reuters reports, “Brown University President Christina Paxson wrote in a message to the campus on Friday that Valente was enrolled in a physics PhD program for a few months in 2000 to 2001. She wrote that ‘it is likely that he would have taken courses and spent time at the site of the shooting, Barus & Holley, where the vast majority of physics courses take place in classrooms and laboratories.’
“Any affiliation Valente had with Brown ended in 2003, when he dropped out after a long leave of absence, according to university officials and investigators. There was no sign of any recent contact. No Brown employee spoken to so far has any memory of him, Paxson wrote.
“Hospitalized survivors of Saturday’s attack in the Brown classroom also appear not to have known their assailant, but later recognized Valente when shown images of him by investigators.”
When Valente won the US Green Card Lottery in 2017, allowing him to become a permanent lawful resident, he listed his former address at Brown in his immigration paperwork, despite also noting that he had dropped out there 15 years earlier.
In response to the killings, the Trump administration has suspended the green-card-lottery program.
In an announcement on X, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described Valente as a “heinous individual.”
“The Brown University shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card,” she wrote.
“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country.
“In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people.
“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”
The DV1 visa program makes around 50,000 green cards available each year by lottery to people from countries that have less representation among the US population, especially in Africa.
According to The Guardian, “Nearly 20 million people applied for the 2025 visa lottery, with more than 131,000 selected when including spouses with the winners. After winning, they must undergo vetting to win admission to the US. Portuguese citizens won only 38 slots.
“Lottery winners are invited to apply for a green card. They are interviewed at consulates and subject to the same requirements and vetting as other green-card applicants.”
