Name: Authorities seek motive in Brown University and MIT professor shootings
Uploaded: 2025-12-21T00:31:22.892Z
Duration: 2 min 40 s
Description: Authorities are seeking motive after the man responsible for the deadly shooting at Brown University and the murder of an MIT professor was found dead in a New Hampshire storage unit on Thursday.

Authorities are seeking motive after the man responsible for the deadly shooting at Brown University and the murder of an MIT professor was found dead in a New Hampshire storage unit on Thursday.

Providence

Authorities are continuing to investigate the motive behind a series of shootings that left two Brown University students and an MIT professor dead. The suspect, Claudio Nueves Valente, a former Brown physics student, was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a New Hampshire storage facility after a six-day manhunt.

Police linked Valente to the crimes using tips from a Reddit post and surveillance footage, as well as AI-powered license plate tracking technology. While Valente and the MIT professor both studied physics at the same university in Portugal in the 1990s, investigators have not yet determined a motive for the attacks.

Authorities seek motive in Brown University and MIT professor shootings

Now to the latest in the investigation into a shooting at Brown University that left two students dead. After a days-long manhunt, the suspect, Claudio Nueves Valente, was found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility. Now investigators believe he also shot and killed an MIT professor in Boston days after the Brown shooting. Tom Hanson has more on how police were able to put these pieces together. The six-day manhunt ended in Salem, New Hampshire, inside a storage unit where the gunman, Claudio Nueves Valente, was found dead by a self-inflicted gunshot. We got him. Valente, a former physics student at Brown, is accused of killing two students and wounding nine others last Saturday. He's also suspected of killing 47-year-old MIT professor Nuno Lauriero outside Boston two days later. The two men had studied physics at the same university in Portugal in the 1990s, but authorities are still searching for a motive. Everyone is wondering why. Are you any closer to understanding a motive in either of these shootings? Yeah, no, definitely not something that has been confirmed at this point. Police got their first break in the case when, according to the affidavit, they were tipped off to a Reddit post written by a man they called John, who saw Valente in the hours before the shooting. The police need to look into a gray Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental, he wrote. That was the car he was driving. John thought Valente was suspicious and wrote down his license plate number. The two men also had some sort of encounter on the street. That matched what police had seen on surveillance video, so they posted this image of John in hopes he would come forward. We didn't know they were the same person until John approached a Providence police officer and came into the Providence police station to give an interview. And once we had that interview, we were on the path very quickly to identifying our suspect. Police then used AI and a company called Flock Safety to locate the car, which spotted it 14 times over the last few weeks, including at an Alamo rental car office in Boston, where surveillance picked up Valente outside. Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley said their software helped police track the car across state lines to the gunman's location at the storage unit in New Hampshire. So they could then see the individual had left the state, had entered Massachusetts, and then left Massachusetts heading into New Hampshire, which gave them that ability to kind of zero in on where to go. And just last night, the attorney general for New Hampshire revealed that Valente died on December 16th. That is just one day after he shot that MIT professor. For CBS Saturday morning, I'm Tom Hanson, Providence, Rhode Island.

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