Brown University Gunman Planned Attack for Years, FBI Says

The man who killed two Brown University students and an Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor last December plotted the crimes over the course of three years, federal law enforcement officials said Wednesday.

The shooter, Claudio Neves Valente, 48, had been socially isolated, making it hard to track his intentions, investigators said in a report released Wednesday that shed some new light into the crimes.

On Dec. 13, Neves Valente, a Portugal native and legal permanent U.S. resident who had been living in Miami, fired multiple shots in a lecture hall at Brown, in Providence, Rhode Island. Two students, Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook, were killed. Two days later, he fatally shot an MIT physicist, Dr. Nuno Loureiro, in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Neves Valente then drove to New Hampshire, where he died by suicide in a storage facility. Police officers on Dec. 18 found his body, two guns and rambling video recordings in which he acknowledged he was the shooter but expressed no remorse.

Neves Valente’s friends and family said in interviews that they had lost track of him years ago, after he quit his job in Portugal and later moved to the United States. In the report Wednesday, investigators shared information about some of his movements in the years before the shootings.

The 9 mm pistols found with his body had been bought legally at a pawnshop in Florida, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Massachusetts wrote in the report.

Neves Valente began planning the attack in 2022, which is when he rented the storage unit in New Hampshire and brought his weapons there, the investigators said in their report.

His motive has been a mystery since he was identified as the killer. The FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit tried to answer that question.

Neves Valente’s victims were “symbolic in nature,” the report said.

“Brown University as a whole and Dr. Loureiro represented to the shooter his personal failures and injustices he perceived were inflicted by others over time,” the investigators wrote. Neves Valente “was likely able to overcome his shame and envy” by violently punishing those he blamed for his own downfall, they added.

“Neves Valente’s transient lifestyle, long-term planning, and social isolation provided little to no opportunity for bystanders” to recognize the significance of what he was planning, the report said. The investigators added that he had lacked support from family and peers who might have noticed warning signs.

Three of the students injured in the December attack each filed a lawsuit this month against Brown, saying the school failed to provide adequate security.

A university spokesperson, Brian Clark, said in a statement that the school would review the complaints “carefully and promptly” and respond through the legal process. “We remain committed to the safety and security of our community and to supporting the path to recovery and repair for our students, faculty, staff and members of the broader community,” he said.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Mark Arsenault/Christopher Capozziello
c. 2026 The New York Times Company

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