A man accused of killing two and wounding nine in a heinous shooting at Brown University last Saturday was found dead by authorities Thursday night from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound at a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire. He is also the lone suspect in Monday evening’s murder of a renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor.
The Suspect
The suspect has been identified as Claudio Manuel Nevis-Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national. He entered the country on a student visa in 2000, when he started in a physics PhD program at Brown University. Nevis-Valente took a leave of absence after the spring 2001 semester and formally withdrew from the university in 2003.
On X, Secretary Homeland Security Kristi Noem said Valente entered the United States in 2017 through the diversity lottery immigrant visa program (DV1) and was granted a green card. “This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” she tweeted. “In 2017, President Trump fought to end this program, following the devastating NYC truck ramming by an ISIS terrorist, who entered under the DV1 program, and murdered eight people.”
Noem said she was “immediately directing [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services] to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program,” at the direction of President Trump.
According to the Associated Press, it was not immediately clear where Nevis-Valente was between taking a leave of absence from Brown University in 2001 and getting the visa in 2017.
As for the shooter’s connection to slain MIT professor Nuno F. Gomes Loureiro, 47, the FBI believes the two attended the same university in Portugal. No other information about motive is currently available.
The Investigation
Throughout the five-day manhunt, law enforcement, the mayor of Providence, and the president of Brown have been under fire for, as Megyn said on Friday’s show, “mostly look[ing] feckless and incompetent throughout this investigation.”
At a press conference late Thursday, those same people took a victory lap, touting that they “all worked well together to identify this suspect” and “crack” the case. But it now appears that there were no major leads until Wednesday, and the key lead came from social media.
“You know what actually solved the case? Social media solved the case. Some guy who saw the suspect was posting what he saw to Reddit in great detail, and the Redditors encouraged him to go to the police, which he then did,” Megyn explained. “And this guy proved to be… we believe, the critical force that led to this guy’s identification.”
Megyn laid out what is known about what led authorities to the suspect based on the supporting arrest affidavit and reporting available thus far. According to the affidavit, police officers received an anonymous tip on December 16 that stuck out from a flood of information. It directed them to a post on Reddit that read:
“I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a gray Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental. That’s the car he was driving. It was parked in front of the little shack behind the Rhode Island Historical Society on the Cooke St side. I know because he used his key fob to open the car, approached it, and then something prompted him to back away. When he backed away, he relocked the car. I found that odd so when he circled the block I approached the car [and] that is when I saw the Florida plates. He was parked in the section between the gate of the RIHS and the corner of Cooke and George St.”
Based on that post, the police say they expanded their video search to the area of the Rhode Island Historical Society. Investigators located a gray/blue Nissan sedan, and police then released still images of the then-unknown person – later identified as “John” – who interacted with the suspect at approximately 2:16pm on the day of the mass shooting.
What’s more? According to the affidavit, the Reddit poster approached Providence Police officers on the street on December 17, identifying himself as “John” and the Reddit user. He told them about his encounter with a suspicious man in Brown University’s Barus Holley building, where the shooting occurred. The tipster said he had encountered the suspect inside a bathroom on the ground floor of the building between 1:45pm and 2pm, around two hours before the first shots were reported.
John said the suspect’s clothing was inappropriate for the weather, and they had made eye contact. John told the police he followed the man after he left the building to a Nissan vehicle with a Florida license plate, but, instead of entering the vehicle, the suspect started walking around the block with John behind him.
At one point, the two men allegedly spoke. John told police he asked the suspect, “Your car’s back there, why are you circling the block?” To which the suspect responded, “Why are you harassing me?” John apparently detected “a cadence or accent” that he believed to be Hispanic. He said he saw the suspect approach the vehicle one more time, but he went on his way and did not have any subsequent encounters.
Additionally, the affidavit revealed that on the morning of December 17, a separate person, a Brown University faculty member, also described a suspicious vehicle, a gray sedan with Florida plates, in the same neighborhood. Investigators found the car was from an Alamo rental location in downtown Boston. From the rental agreement, they got a name Claudio Manuel Nevis-Valente.
“So, that’s how they caught him. There were things happening on the Boston end, too, around the MIT professor, but… it seems like it was… this guy who posted on Reddit named John,” Megyn noted. “Jesse Watters had a guest last night who was reporting they believe [John] is a former Brown student who is now homeless. Unconfirmed, but that was reported both online and on Fox last night.”
There have been reports that Nevis-Valente may have been using foreign SIM cards to cover his tracks. Shoddy security footage on the Brown campus coupled with potentially inconstant cell phone data is part of what may have hindered this investigation from the jump.
“I think that law enforcement here got caught flatfooted because… they go to the surveillance footage right away [and] they go to cell phones,” Buck Sexton, who once worked in the New York Police Department (NYPD) Intelligence Division, told Megyn on Friday’s show. “If somebody is good enough at covering their tracks on those fronts, then it’s old fashioned police work. And Reddit might move a lot faster on that than some of these cops can. That’s just the truth.”
Protecting the Public
Speaking to the media Thursday night, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley – who told the public throughout the week that there was no need to worry despite the fact that a murderer was still on the loose – said his “Providence neighbors can finally breathe a little easier.”
Megyn said that is no thanks to his own leadership. “I guess we weren’t actually safe when the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, said, ‘I know we’re safe because there’s been no additional shooting since Saturday morning,’” she noted. “Actually, the MIT professor was not safe. No one was safe until that guy put a bullet in his own brain.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Sexton by tuning in to episode 1,217 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s The Megyn Kelly Channel (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.