Police looking into whether MIT professor's killing could be linked to Brown shooting

The suspect in the Brown University mass shooting, found dead Thursday in New Hampshire, is believed to have also shot and killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor in Brookline.

Rhode Island officials announced the death of 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who was found with an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire.

Authorities had been searching for the shooter since the attack on Saturday in Providence, Rhode Island, which left students Ella Cook and Mukhammed Aziz Umurzokov dead and nine other people injured.

Two days later, on Monday, 47-year-old Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a well-known nuclear science professor at MIT, was fatally shot at his Brookline home.

Neves Valente is also thought to be responsible for that killing. U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Leah Foley said he and Loureiro are believed to have known each other.

“Investigators identified the vehicle that he had rented in Boston and then drove to Rhode Island,” Foley said. “The vehicle was seen outside of Brown, and there was security footage that showed a person who resembled him.”

She added that financial investigations linked Neves Valente to the car and hotels he stayed at.

“There was security footage that captured him within a half-mile of the professor’s residence in Brookline,” Foley said. “And there is video footage of him entering an apartment building in the location of the professor’s apartment, and then later that evening, he is seen about an hour later entering the storage unit wearing the same clothes that he had been seen wearing right after the murder.”

FBI Special Agent in Charge Ted Docks said that Neves Valente is believed to have attended the same Portuguese university in Lisbon as Loureiro.

Brown University President Christina Paxson added that Neves Valente was enrolled in physics classes at the school between 2000 and 2001, and that he would have attended classes in the Barus & Holley building, where the shooting took place.

At a press conference earlier this week, the FBI said there was nothing at that stage of the investigation linking the two shootings.

Brookline officials issued a statement about the investigation on Wednesday, seeking to quell “rumors and fear,” they said, that have been spreading throughout the community. But they said they were able to reveal a few details about the case.

Loureiro, who joined MIT in 2016, was named last year to lead MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, where he aimed to advance clean energy technology and other research. The center, one of the school’s largest labs, had more than 250 people working across seven buildings when he took the helm.

The professor, who was married, grew up in Viseu in central Portugal and studied in Lisbon before earning a doctorate in London, according to MIT. He was a researcher at an institute for nuclear fusion in Lisbon before joining MIT, it said.

A 22-year-old student at Boston University who lives near Loureiro’s apartment in Brookline told The Boston Globe she heard three loud noises Monday evening and feared it was gunfire. “I had never heard anything so loud, so I assumed they were gunshots,” Liv Schachner was quoted as saying. “It’s difficult to grasp. It just seems like it keeps happening.”