Federal investigators said they believe the man who killed Brown University students and later killed an MIT professor did not act at random, instead selecting targets investigators say were tied to personal grievances and feelings of marginalization. In a behavioral assessment released Wednesday, the FBI identified the gunman as Claudio Neves Valente, 48, and described the Brown and MIT killings as connected by the meanings the institutions and people held for him.
The FBI said Neves Valente appeared to target “places and people for what they represented in his own life,” including institutions and individuals he associated with personal failure, missed opportunity and perceived injustice. Authorities described the violence as “symbolic in nature,” saying Brown University and Loureiro represented, to the shooter, his “personal failures and injustices he perceived were inflicted by others over time.”
According to the FBI, Neves Valente spent years planning the Dec. 13 attack in isolation, rarely staying in one place and lacking what investigators described as traditional support systems such as family, peers and authority figures who might have recognized warning signs. The assessment said investigators saw “little to no opportunity for bystanders to observe and contextualize the significance of his behaviors,” and it described Neves Valente as having built “a narrative of grievance and inadequacy.”
The FBI said the assessment found Neves Valente struggled with how he viewed his achievements and that his “failures outweighed successes,” contributing to increased paranoia and what the FBI described as mental stress that led to him being committed to dying. The FBI also said mental health stressors alone could not fully explain the attacks, and it emphasized that only Neves Valente knew the full reason behind what he did.
The FBI said Neves Valente killed two Brown students and wounded nine others inside an engineering building on Dec. 13. Two days later, authorities said, he killed MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, ending a multistate search after Neves Valente was later found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire.
Investigators also said Neves Valente recorded a series of videos and audio messages after the attacks in which he confessed to the shootings, expressed no remorse and voiced grievances that aligned with what the FBI outlined in the assessment. Authorities said those materials, however, did not provide a clear explanation for his actions, and they said Neves Valente acted alone and that the attacks had no known connection to terrorism.
Authorities said Neves Valente briefly attended Brown as a doctoral student in the early 2000s but did not complete the program, and investigators said that connection later factored into how he viewed the university. The FBI said the firearms used in the attacks were legally purchased in Florida years earlier.
Even as the FBI released its assessment, the violence remains the subject of civil litigation. Students injured in the attack filed a lawsuit earlier this week, alleging Brown University ignored prior warnings about the shooter and did not provide adequate security that could have prevented the tragedy.