BOSTON (AP) — The man identified as the shooter who killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor He planned the attack for years and left behind videos in which he confessed to the killings but gave no motive, according to information released Tuesday by the US Department of Justice.
Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, was found dead in a storage facility in New Hampshire after killing two students and injuring nine others in an engineering building on December 13. Two days later, he killed MIT professor Nuno FG Loureiro at his home in the Boston suburb of Brookline.
Justice Department officials said Tuesday during a tour of the storage facility where Neves Valente’s a body was found On December 18, the FBI found an electronic device containing a series of short videos made by Neves Valente after the shootings.
In the recordings, the shooter admitted in Portuguese that he spent at least six semesters solving the details. He did not give a reason for targeting Brown or a professor with whom he attended school decades ago in Portugal.
The videos don’t provide a motive, but address misinformation
In an English-translated transcript provided by the Justice Department, Neves Valente said he felt he had nothing to apologize for. In the videos, he also complained of an eye injury during gunfights.
“I’m not going to apologize because no one has ever given me a sincere apology in my lifetime,” he said.
He specifically addressed unsubstantiated claims spread by conservative influencer Laura Loomer after the attack that gunman Brown was speaking in Arabic when he said something like “Allahu akbar” as he entered the auditorium.
Neves Valente said he did not speak a word of Arabic, nor did he intend to make any statement. If he said anything, “he had to make an exclamation like, ‘Oh no!’ or something like that,” he said to express his disappointment that the auditorium looked empty when he entered. The students were hiding under the desks, but Neves Valente thought they had already escaped through the emergency exit.
“I never wanted to do it in an auditorium. I wanted to do it in a regular room,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of opportunities. This semester especially, I’ve had a lot of opportunities, but I’ve always shied away.”
The students were shot at random
He insisted he was not mentally ill. He said he didn’t want to be famous and the video wasn’t a manifesto.
Neves Valente said his “only goal was to more or less leave” on “his own terms” and make sure he “won’t be the one who suffers the most from all of this.”
“No, that can’t happen. So if you don’t like it, bad luck,” he said. Neves Valente called his execution of the murders “a bit incompetent”.
“But at least something was done,” he said.
Neves Valente injured nine people and killed two students: sophomore Ella Cook, 19, and 18-year-old freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov.
Two days later, authorities said Neves Valente fatally shot Loureiro. Valente and Loureiro attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal from 1995 to 2000. Loureiro graduated in 2000 from the physics program at the Instituto Superior Técnico, a leading engineering school in that country, according to his MIT faculty page. That same year, Neves Valente was fired from his position at the University of Lisbon, according to an archive of the then-president of the school’s February 2000 deposition.
He said in the recording that the storage area where his body was found was about three years old.
Brown University said in a statement Tuesday that “the gravity of this tragedy continues to weigh heavily on the entire Brown University community” and that it continues to mourn the deaths of the two students and pray for the full recovery of those who were injured.
Shooter describes meeting witnesses
Neves Valente mentioned his confrontation with the witness at Brown’s, which eventually led to his identification a few days later.
According to the police, the witness had several meetings with Neves Valente before attack. When police released images of a person of interest, a witness began posting on the social media forum Reddit that he knew the person and theorized that police should be looking at a “possibly rental” gray Nissan. Reddit users urged him to notify the FBI, and the witness said he did.
Until then, according to a police statement, officials had not connected the vehicle to a possible shooter.
“I was actually confronted,” Neves Valente said of the shooting of Brown, adding that a witness saw his license plate.
“I honestly never thought it would take them this long to find me,” he said.
He said he has no hate or love for the United States, where he first came some 25 years ago to study physics in Brown’s graduate program before leaving in the spring of 2001.
Neves Valente studied at Brown on a student visa. He finally obtained legal permanent residency in September 2017. His last known residence was in Miami.
“It’s the same with Portugal and most of the places I’ve been,” he said, later adding that “I’ve been here for a very long time without worry.”
Leave a Reply