BOSTON — The man has been identified as the shooter who was killed Two Brown University students and an MIT professor He planned the attack for years and left behind videos in which he admitted to the murders but did not give a motive, according to information released Tuesday by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Claudio Nieves ValienteThe 48-year-old, a former Brown University student and Portuguese citizen, was found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility after killing two students and wounding nine others in an engineering building on December 13. Two days later, MIT professor Nuno F. J. Loureiro was killed in his home in the Boston suburb of Brooklyn.
During a search of the storage facility where Nevis Valiente is located, Justice Department officials said Tuesday The body has been found On December 18, the FBI found an electronic device containing a series of short videos that Nieves Valiente had filmed after the shooting.
In the recordings, the shooter admitted in Portuguese that he had been working on the details for at least six semesters. He did not give a motive for targeting Brown or the professor who attended school with him in Portugal decades ago.
In an English-translated text provided by the Justice Department, Nieves Valiente said he felt he had nothing to apologize for. He also complained in the videos that his eye was injured during the shooting.
He said: “I will not apologize because in my life no one has sincerely apologized to me.”
He explicitly addressed the baseless claims spread by conservative influencer Laura Loomer after the attack that Brown’s shooter spoke in Arabic, saying something like “Allahu Akbar” as he entered the hall.
Nieves Valiente said he did not speak a single word of Arabic and did not intend to make any kind of statement. If he said anything, it must have been an exclamation like, “Oh no!” Or something like that,” he said, expressing disappointment that the hall seemed empty when he walked in. The students were hiding under the desks, but Nieves Valiente thought they had already escaped through the emergency exit.
“I never wanted to do it in an auditorium. I wanted to do it in a regular room,” he said. “I’ve had a lot of opportunities. Especially this semester, I’ve had a lot of opportunities, but I’ve always failed.”
He insisted that he was not mentally ill. He said he didn’t want to become famous and that the video was not a statement.
Nieves Valiente said his “only goal is to leave more or less” on “his own terms” and make sure that “he will not be the one who ends up suffering the most from all of this.”
He said, “No, this can’t happen. So, if you don’t like it, that’s okay.” Nieves Valiente described his execution of the murders as “a little incompetent.”
“But at least something was done,” he added.
Nieves Valiente injured nine people and killed two students: sophomore Ella Cook, 19, and freshman Muhammed Aziz Omurzukov, 18.
Two days later, authorities said. Nieves Valiente shot and killed Loureiro. Valiente and Loureiro attended the same academic program at a university in Portugal between 1995 and 2000. Loureiro graduated from the physics program at the Instituto Polytechnic, that country’s leading engineering school, in 2000, according to the MIT faculty page. That same year, Nieves Valente was dismissed from his position at the University of Lisbon, according to an archive of a termination notice from the then university president in February 2000.
He said in the recording that he had the storage space where his body was found about three years ago.
Brown University said in a statement Tuesday that “the gravity of this tragedy continues to weigh heavily on the entire Brown University community” and that they continue to mourn the deaths of the two students and pray for the full recovery of those injured.
Nieves Valiente mentioned to him Confrontation with the witness in Brown which eventually led to his identification days later.
According to police, the witness had met Nieves Valiente several times before Attack. When police released photos of the person of interest, the witness began posting on the social media forum Reddit that he recognized the person and assumed police must be searching a gray Nissan “possibly a rental.” Reddit users urged him to report it to the FBI, and the witness said he did.
At that point, officials had not linked a vehicle to the possible shooter, the police affidavit says.
“I was actually confronted,” Nieves Valiente said of Brown’s shooting, adding that the witness saw his license plate.
“Honestly, I never thought it would take this long to find me,” he said.
He said he had no hatred or love for the United States, where he first arrived about 25 years ago to study physics in the Brown graduate program before leaving in the spring of 2001.
Nieves Valiente studied at Brown University on a student visa. He eventually obtained permanent legal residency in September 2017. His last known residence was in Miami.
“The same goes for Portugal, and most of the places I’ve been,” he said, later adding: “I’ve been here without caring for a very long time now.”