Officials: A suspect in murders at prestigious US schools committed suicide

Officials: According to authorities, the suspect who led a reign of terror at two prestigious US universities—the murder of a nuclear physics professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a mass shooting at Ivy League Brown University—has taken his own life.

Oscar Perez, the police chief of Providence, Rhode Island, said Thursday night that the guy, who was identified as Claudio Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese former Brown student, had been discovered dead in a storage facility as authorities surrounded him.

The investigations were conducted in three states since the storage facility was located in the neighboring state of New Hampshire.

On Saturday, when students were getting ready for final examinations at the School of Engineering at Brown University in Providence, a gunman entered with weapons blazing, killing two and injuring nine.

Similar to Valente, Nuno Loureiro, the head of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was assassinated on Monday night at his Brookline, Massachusetts, home.

Peter Neronha, the attorney general of Rhode Island, described the attack’s motivation as a “mystery.”

He was a physics master’s and doctoral student who left Brown in 2001, and he and MIT professor Loureiro had studied together at a Portuguese institution, according to authorities.

Investigations failed when Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel said on Sunday that a man had been arrested as a suspect, but investigations threw him out as a suspect as the panic swept over the nation’s prestigious university campuses.

The breakthrough, according to Neronha, occurred when a guy who had talked to the suspect got in touch with the authorities after they had shared images of the two of them taken by security cameras.

Law authorities eventually located Valente thanks to the witness’s vital information, which included the license plate of his rented car.

According to Neronha, he was linked to the Brown University shooting by DNA.

At a separate press conference in Boston, federal prosecutor Leah Foley of Massachusetts said that they linked Valente to two instances via his vehicle.