The morning after a deadly shooting at Brown University, FBI officials announced they had detained a person of interest in a hotel room.
The lead, officials said, had been “very promising.” But it was the wrong person — and the real shooter would strike again, killing an MIT physics professor in Brookline.
“We had to run that to ground. We couldn’t just like not run that to ground,” Peter Neronha, Attorney General of Rhode Island, said, following a question that if they hadn’t focused on the wrong person if the professor, identified as Nuno Loureiro, 47, would still be alive.
Officials had previously denied that the two incidents were related.
This combo image made with photos provided by the FBI and the Providence, Rhode Island, Police Department shows a person of interest in the shooting that occurred at Brown University in Providence, R.I., Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025. (FBI/Providence Police Department via AP)AP
Around 4 p.m. on Dec. 13, gunfire erupted on the first floor of Brown’s Barus and Holley engineering and physics building during an economics class. The shooting left sophomore Ella Cook and first-year student Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov dead and nine other students injured.
Officials said when the first person of interest was confronted by the FBI, he was not cooperative and there were guns in the room, including one with a laser light.
“The witnesses had told us there was a laser sight used in the course of the attack,” Neronha said.
DNA ruled out the person of interest, officials said, and he was released. But during that time, other teams of police officers never stopped looking for other possible suspects.
“You don’t chase one and stop,” Neronha said. “We have chased more than one lead over the course of the last four to five days.”
Overall, Neronha said, there were at least four different leads that didn’t work out. And one that finally did.
“But you’re running them all down at the same time,” Neronha said. “But I don’t believe that we would have found this person any sooner given the evidence that was available to us.”
Around 8:30 p.m. on Monday, police responded to a report of gunshots at a Brookline apartment building and discovered a man, later identified as Loureiro, in the foyer who had been shot multiple times.
Loureiro was taken to Beth Israel Hospital and later pronounced dead.
Loureiro was a professor of nuclear science and engineering and the director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, according to the university’s website.
Visitors pause at a makeshift memorial for the victims of Saturday’s shooting, at the Van Wickle Gate at Brown University, Monday, Dec. 15, 2025, in Providence, R.I.(AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty)AP
The tip that ultimately broke the case wasn’t posted on Reddit until early Tuesday morning.
Officials said they were aware of the Reddit post but didn’t know who the person was behind it. They continued searching and the Reddit user came forward.
“All the law enforcement personnel that I interacted with today were extremely professional and worked hard to really put me at ease,” the Reddit user wrote on Wednesday.
Through this tip, officials learned of 48-year-old Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente. He was ultimately identified as the shooter in both cases.
“We got him,” FBI Boston Special Agent-in-Charge Ted Docks said during the press conference.
Neves Valente had taken his own life in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire.
Prior to the discovery of Neves Valente’s body, Providence police were set to charge him with 25 counts, including two charges of first-degree murder, according to court documents.
Brown University’s records indicated that Neves Valente had been a doctoral student studying physics from the fall semester of 2000 to the spring semester of 2001, Detective Ryan Fedo wrote in a Thursday court filing. He took a leave of absence the following semester before dropping out in the fall of 2003.
Neves Valente became a legal permanent resident of the U.S. in 2017. His last known address was located in Miami, Florida.
During a press conference Thursday night, Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Leah Foley said she believed Neves Valente and MIT Professor Loureiro knew each other. Both men were from Portugal, and Providence Police Chief Col. Oscar Perez Jr. said at a different conference earlier that night that they’d previously studied at the same university in Lisbon.
But as of Thursday night, there was no clear motive in the mass shooting at Brown University or in Loureiro’s killing, Foley said.
