The alleged Brown University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology shooter had a bizarre connection to at least one of the victims: He was a monitor who was terminated from his position the same year the victim graduated.
According to police, Claudio Neves-Valente — a 48-year-old Portuguese national they say carried out the murders in Providence, Rhode Island, and Brookline, Massachusetts — was found dead in a Salem, New Hampshire, self-storage unit on Thursday.
As ABC News reported, police had begun to link the two murders in the 24 hours before they closed in on Neves-Valente after comparing notes and noticing the similarities in the academia slayings, which claimed the life of two Brown students and one prominent MIT professor.
The connection to Brown is obvious: Neves-Valente was briefly a graduate student there, and while the investigation will likely turn up a reason for his alleged animus in the days to come, one can assume there was an animus there.
His connection to Nuno Loureiro, the 47-year-old MIT nuclear fusion professor who was shot at his home on Monday and died on Tuesday, is a little more bizarre.
While Neves-Valente did not attend MIT, he did have a position at the same school that Loureiro graduated from in Portugal.
“According to records from Instituto Superior Técnico (I.S.T.), the preeminent Portuguese engineering school, a person named Claudio Neves-Valente was terminated from a monitor position in February of 2000, the same year that Loureiro graduated from I.S.T.,” Vanity Fair reported.
“A car believed to have been rented by the person of interest in the Brown case is the same make and model of the car identified in connection with the M.I.T. case.”
The FBI’s Boston special agent on the case confirmed the 25-year-old link during the news conference Thursday evening:
NEW: FBI Boston special agent confirms a link between the Brown University shooter and the MIT professor shot dead in his home:
“It is believed that in Lisbon that those two individuals attended the same university in Portugal.” pic.twitter.com/ZvTXaKfU8x
— Fox News (@FoxNews) December 19, 2025
This is obviously strange, but stranger still is the fact that authorities not only didn’t seem to notice the relationship between the two killings, but actively insisted there wasn’t one.
“This is a staunch change from the F.B.I. ‘s earlier statement that there seemed to be ‘no connection’ between the two murders,” Vanity Fair noted.
And yes, one is aware of the fact that investigations take time and aren’t easy. This comes at the end of an investigation, however, that seemed to be needlessly complicated by some genuinely inept handling of the public-facing aspects. A sample:
The police are refusing to say what the Brown University shooter yelled before opening fire and kiIIing 2 people
Witnesses say he shouted “Allahu Akbar.”
Why are the police covering this up? pic.twitter.com/xmCPGmVTwc
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) December 16, 2025
WATCH:
Amid mounting scrutiny over officials’ handling of Saturday’s shooting at Brown University, Providence police chief Oscar Perez misspoke about key details when questioned by reporters.
Perez initially said video of the suspect was captured inside the building before the… pic.twitter.com/y8F74ZPjdO
— Washington Free Beacon (@FreeBeacon) December 17, 2025
What an odd response from Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha.
He wasn’t actually asked a question—after taking a few minutes to think, he stepped up to the podium to respond to an earlier question about the Brown University taking down some webpages. That question was… pic.twitter.com/3OTpsgPHEf
— Laura Powell (@LauraPowellEsq) December 17, 2025
Reporter: “You didn’t have cameras in that building. Just say it.”
Brown President Christina Paxson: “I do not think a lack of cameras in that building had anything to do with what happened there.” pic.twitter.com/RSfD4Cp4LM
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) December 19, 2025
What’s truly amazing here is that, after all this ineptitude, Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha — the one you saw stepping in to answer questions for the Brown University president about certain webpages being scrubbed during the search for the perpetrator — had the gall to insist that people should stop engaging in speculation about motive.
From WLNE-TV earlier on Thursday:
According to Brown University, a student’s personal information was shared online, and now Attorney General Peter Neronha is attempting to stem the flow of internet rumors.
Rumors gained more traction after information about the doxxed student was seemingly removed from Brown’s website.
Neronha said that any online rumors about political, religious or racial motivations behind the shooting are unfounded.
These rumors, of course, would not have persisted if the police were totally upfront and said that this person was not an individual of interest. Furthermore, it’s not as if the sequence of events lent any credibility to these pleas.
For starters, a person of interest was arrested early on in the investigation. The people of Providence were ensured they could stop sheltering in place and that all was safe. That individual’s identity wasn’t just shared online, it was shared with the entire world. That guy was a white male, it’s worth noting. He turned out not to be a suspect after all; when this was announced Sunday, authorities still said that the people of the Providence area shouldn’t worry.
Well, authorities were apparently partially right: It was instead in Brookline, Massachusetts, that Neves-Valente allegedly struck next, although police initially saw no connection. All the while, they gave half-answers about what the shooter had yelled before the Brown attack (they later settled on this being incoherent screeching, although how believable this is depends on your level of trust in law enforcement here, which ought to be low) and refused to answer any questions about the “doxxed student” — notable because said student was a self-identified Palestinian activist. They were fine with doxxing the white male, apparently, but that was a bridge too far.
They eventually closed in on Neves-Valente, albeit days later, with one additional person dead and authorities only sussing out the connection in the 24 hours before he was tracked to Salem, where he apparently took his own life.
In short, nobody has acquitted themselves well here. The Providence police chief, many said, was a DEI hire; he certainly emphasized DEI during his tenure with the force and did nothing in public to disabuse anyone of the fact that he was hired for identitarian reasons. But then again, both the mayor of Providence and the Rhode Island attorney general were white males and they were little better; the fact they’re Democrats perhaps explains their inefficacy. And then there’s the Brown University president, whose disgraceful cluelessness gives onlookers another reason to distrust elite academia, if they even needed one.
Should authorities have honed in on this odd connection earlier? We’ll probably discover whether or not important information was missed as the story develops. All one can say is this: Everyone involved in this sad fiasco of a dragnet, more or less, has given you every reason to believe they should have.
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