The U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday that Claudio Neves Valente, the gunman who killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor in December, had been planning the attacks for years and left behind videos in which he confessed to the killings but provided no motive.
The recordings, recovered by the FBI from a New Hampshire storage facility where Neves Valente was found dead Dec. 18, show a man who said he had nothing to apologize for — and who explicitly refuted baseless claims spread online that he had spoken Arabic during the Brown attack.
BOSTON — The U.S. Department of Justice said Tuesday that Claudio Neves Valente, 48, the gunman who killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor last month, had been planning the attacks for years and left behind a series of videos in which he confessed to the killings but provided no motive.
Neves Valente, a former Brown University graduate student and Portuguese national, fatally shot sophomore Ella Cook, 19, and freshman MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, 18, and wounded nine others in an engineering building on Dec. 13. Two days later, authorities say, he fatally shot MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro in Loureiro’s home in the Boston suburb of Brookline. Neves Valente was found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility on Dec. 18.
Videos with no motive
Justice Department officials said the FBI recovered an electronic device from the storage facility containing a series of short videos Neves Valente recorded after the shootings. In the recordings, made in Portuguese, he admitted to planning the attacks for at least six semesters and described his execution of the killings as “a little incompetent.”
He did not give a motive for targeting Brown University or Loureiro.
“I’m not going to apologize because during my lifetime no one sincerely apologized to me,” Neves Valente said in one recording, according to an English-translated transcript provided by the Justice Department.
He stated 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 this.” He insisted he was not mentally ill, said he did not want to be famous, and said the video was not a manifesto.
Refuting online misinformation
In the videos, Neves Valente explicitly addressed baseless claims spread after the attack by conservative influencer Laura Loomer, who had asserted the shooter spoke Arabic and said something like “Allahu akbar” upon entering the auditorium.
Neves Valente said he did not speak a word of Arabic and did not intend to make any kind of statement. If he said anything upon entering, he said he “must have made an exclamation like, ‘Oh no!’ or something like that,” expressing disappointment that the space appeared to be empty. Students, he said, were hiding under desks; he had thought they had already fled through an emergency exit.
“I never wanted to do it in an auditorium. I wanted to do it in a regular room,” he said. “I had plenty of opportunities. Especially this semester, I had plenty of opportunities, but I always chickened out.”
Connection to victims
Neves Valente and Loureiro had attended the same academic program at Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal’s premier engineering school, between 1995 and 2000, according to the Justice Department and Loureiro’s MIT faculty page. Loureiro graduated from the institution’s physics program in 2000. That same year, according to an archived termination notice from the school’s then-president, Neves Valente was dismissed from a position at the Lisbon university.
Neves Valente first arrived in the United States roughly 25 years ago to study physics at Brown’s graduate program, leaving in spring 2001. He obtained U.S. legal permanent residence in September 2017. His last known residence was in Miami. He said he had held the New Hampshire storage unit for about three years.
Witness and identification
Neves Valente described in the recordings his encounter with a witness at Brown that ultimately led to his identification. According to police, the witness had several interactions with Neves Valente before the attack. After police posted images of a person of interest, the witness began posting on Reddit, identifying the individual and suggesting investigators look into “possibly a rental” gray Nissan. Reddit users urged him to contact the FBI; the witness said he did. Until that point, according to a police affidavit, investigators had not connected any vehicle to the possible shooter.
“I actually was confronted,” Neves Valente said of the Brown shooting, noting that the witness had seen his license plate. “I honestly never thought it would take them so long to find me,” he added.
University statement
Brown University said in a statement Tuesday that “the gravity of this tragedy continues to weigh heavily on the full Brown University community” and that the university continues to mourn the deaths of Cook and Umurzokov and pray for the full recovery of those injured.