Tag: Suspect

  • Brown Mass Shooting Suspect Admits to Crime

    Brown Mass Shooting Suspect Admits to Crime

    Transcripts from the videos in which Claudio Neves Valente admitted to the crimes were released Tuesday.

    Bing Guan/AFP/Getty Images

    The man accused of carrying out last month’s mass shooting at Brown University that left two students dead admitted to the crime in a series of four videos, the transcripts of which were released Tuesday by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts. 

    Claudio Neves Valente, the 48-year-old suspect who previously attended Brown, was found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot wound at a storage facility in New Hampshire just days after the campus attack, preventing investigators from interrogating him. But in the videos, which were pulled from an electronic device at the storage facility and have been translated from Portuguese to English, Valente admitted to the Brown shooting and the subsequent killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor near Boston. 

    And while the suspect said that he would not apologize, the motives of the attack remain unclear.

    Throughout the more than 11 minutes’ worth of video, he spoke about how he had planned the shooting for years. In multiple instances, Valente vaguely referenced “the people” his violent actions were made in response to, saying, “I did not like any one of you. I saw all of this shit from the beginning.” 

    He noted that he sent three emails, seemingly to “the people” he’d referenced. But beyond that, he was “not saying anything else.”

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  • Suspect in Brown Shooting Found Dead

    Suspect in Brown Shooting Found Dead

    The suspect wanted in connection to a mass shooting at Brown University that killed two students and injured nine was found dead in a storage unit in Salem, N.H., authorities said at a news conference Thursday night.

    They identified Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, a former Brown student and Portuguese national, as the man they say barged into an engineering classroom at Brown last Saturday and opened fire on students attending a review session. Valente died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

    “We are 100 percent confident that this is our target and that this case is closed from a perspective of pursuing people involved,” Rhode Island attorney general Peter Nerhona said.

    Officials said they believed Valente was also connected to the murder of MIT nuclear physicist Nuno Loureiro earlier in the week. The same rental car had been spotted near Brown and outside Loureiro’s home, authorities said.

    Loureiro was shot at his home Monday night and died at the hospital the next day. His home in Brookline, Mass., is about 50 miles from Brown. Authorities said that in the 1990s, Valente had attended the same university in Lisbon as Loureiro.

    Brown President Christina Paxson said at the press conference that Valente had been a student at Brown in the early 2000s but withdrew. She noted that he was a physics student and had likely spent a lot of time in the Barus and Holley science building, where Saturday’s shooting took place.

    Paxson wrote in an update Friday that the students injured Saturday were all improving; three had been released from the hospital and six remained in stable condition.

    Officials said Valente entered the U.S. in 2000 on a student visa; he became a lawful permanent resident in 2017.

    On Friday, the Trump administration announced it was suspending the green card lottery program through which Valente entered the country in 2017. The Diversity Immigrant Visa program, or DV1, allows some 50,000 people a year from low-immigration countries to participate in a random selection process for entry to the U.S.

    Valente “entered the United States through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) in 2017 and was granted a green card,” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem wrote on X. “This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country. … At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services] to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”

    This story was updated 12/19 with news about the condition of the injured Brown students and the Trump administration’s pause on a visa lottery program.

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  • Two Killed and Seven, Including Suspect, Injured in FSU Shooting

    Two Killed and Seven, Including Suspect, Injured in FSU Shooting

    One suspect has been taken into custody after a shooting that left two victims dead and six injured at Florida State University’s student union on Thursday, law enforcement officials said in a press briefing.

    The suspect, who was identified as Phoenix Ikner, a 20-year-old FSU student and the son of a school resource deputy with the Leon County Sheriff’s Department, has also been hospitalized. He was shot by police after he “did not comply with commands,” according to Tallahassee Police Department chief Lawrence E. Revell.

    The two deceased victims were not students, Revell said, but he couldn’t share any other information about the victims’ identities.

    FSU president Richard McCullough called this a “tragic day for Florida State University” at the briefing.

    “We’re working to support the victims, the families and everyone affected,” he said.

    FSU students and employees received an emergency notification at 12:02 p.m. to shelter in place due to an active shooter near the campus’s student union. According to Revell, FSU campus police arrived on the scene “almost immediately” after the shooting began just before noon. Other local law enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Jacksonville field office and its Tallahassee suboffice, were involved in the response to the shooting. The Tallahassee police will lead the investigation.

    Over three hours later, police notified the campus that they had “neutralized the threat” but asked the public to continue avoiding the student union and the surrounding area. Students were advised to remain indoors except to walk to their dorms or the designated reunification point.

    Revell said the handgun Ikner used was his mother’s former service weapon. The suspect also had a shotgun with him, Revell said, but it was unclear if he had used it. Revell said the police did not yet know of any motive for the shooting and that Ikner had invoked his right not to speak with police.

    At the press briefing, McCullough said he had just returned from visiting the victims in the hospital.

    “Right now our top priority is safety and well-being for all the people on our campus,” he said.

    One FSU junior, McKenzie Heeter, told NBC that the assailant shot at her with what she thought was a rifle as she was exiting the student union with her lunch just before noon, but he missed. He then returned to his car and retrieved a handgun and shot another individual, at which point Heeter began running away from the student union and back to her apartment.

    “It was just me and like three other people that noticed at first, but we were walking in the opposite direction away from the union, so we started running. I just told everybody that I could see, stay away from campus,” she told NBC.

    Another group of about 40 individuals avoided the shooter by locking themselves in a bowling alley in the student union’s basement, The Tallahassee Democrat reported.

    Classes at FSU are canceled through Friday, and athletic events are canceled through the end of the weekend.

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