New York, Dec 19 The suspect who launched a reign of terror at two elite US institutions with a mass shooting at the Ivy League Brown University and the murder of a nuclear science professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has killed himself, officials said.
The man was identified as Claudio Valente, a 48-year-old former Brown student from Portugal, and he was found dead in a storage facility as law enforcement closed in on him, Oscar Perez, the police chief of Providence in Rhode Island, said Thursday night.
The storage facility was in neighbouring New Hampshire state, stretching the investigations across three states.
Two students were killed on Saturday at Brown University in Providence and nine were injured as they were preparing for final exams at the School of Engineering when the shooter burst in, guns blazing.
On Monday night, the director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Nuno Loureiro, a Portugal native like Valente, was killed at his house in Brookline in Massachusetts.
Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said the motive for the attacks was a “mystery”.
Possible clues were that he was a master’s and PhD student in Physics, who dropped out from Brown in 2001, and he and the MIT professor, Loureiro, had studied together at a Portuguese university, officials said.
As terror spread among elite university campuses across the country, the investigations misfired when Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Kash Patel announced on Sunday the arrest of a man as a suspect, but investigations ruled him out as a suspect.
Neronha said the breakthrough came when a man who had spoken to the suspect contacted the officials after they had circulated pictures of both of them from surveillance cameras.
The witness gave them crucial information, including the license plate of his rental vehicle that finally led law enforcement to Valente.
Neronha said that DNA connected him to the Brown University shooting.
Massachusetts federal prosecutor Leah Foley said at a separate news conference in Boston that they connected Valente to two cases through his car.
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