What We Know About the MIT, Brown Suspect

Investigators are still trying to piece together the motives they say led Claudio Neves Valente to stage a mass shooting at Brown University, then kill an MIT professor days later. The 48-year-old took his own life at a storage facility in New Hampshire before investigators could speak to him. Neves Valente does have a connection to both:

• Neves Valente studied physics in his native Portugal in the 1990s at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon. He was there at the same time as Dr. Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor who was fatally shot, and the New York Times reports that while both were top students, Loureiro received the higher grade. The men were believed to have known each other, but the university has not released much information on that.

• Neves Valente came to the US and enrolled at Brown University in 2000 as a grad student in physics, but he took a leave of absence in 2001 and withdrew in 2003. He likely would have been familiar with the physics building where the shooting took place, though he doesn't appear to have left a big impression during his time at Brown, notes the Times. "We have thus far found no indication of any concerns pertaining to conduct or any public safety interactions during the short time Neves Valente was enrolled," says President Christina Paxson.
• He obtained legal permanent status in the US in 2017, notes the AP, though it wasn't clear if he was in the country the entire time after leaving Brown. His last known address was in Miami.
• Authorities say Neves Valente changed the license plate on his rental car while he was on the run, reports CNN. "He knew what he was doing," says Peter Neronha, the attorney general of Rhode Island, where Brown is located.
• Police connected the two shootings after a man at Brown came forward (and posted on Reddit) about confronting a suspicious-looking suspect and getting a license plate. A plate reader located one of the two plates in use in Salem, New Hampshire, where Neves Valente was found dead.