Investigation into Ex-Brown Student's Shootings Continues

Authorities continue to investigate the motives behind a series of shootings that claimed three lives last week, including two students at Brown University and an MIT professor. Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national and former Brown graduate student, is believed to have carried out the attacks before dying by suicide.

On December 13, Neves Valente opened fire inside a lecture hall in Brown University's Barus and Holley engineering building in Providence, Rhode Island. The shooting killed undergraduates Ella Cook, 19, from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, 18, from Virginia, while injuring nine other students. Witnesses described chaos as the gunman entered the room and began firing, with one report noting he made unusual noises during the assault.

Two days later, on December 15, Neves Valente drove to Brookline, Massachusetts, and fatally shot Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a 48-year-old MIT professor of nuclear science and engineering, in the foyer of his apartment building. Loureiro, also Portuguese, had studied alongside Neves Valente as undergraduates at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon between 1995 and 2000. Authorities have not established a direct...