Tag: Claudio Manuel Neves Valente

Claudio Manuel Neves Valente complained of an eye injury he suffered when he opened fire at Brown University, killing two students and wounding nine

“I don’t regret what I did,” a wounded Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the man who is suspected of last month’s mass shooting at Brown University that killed two and wounded another nine students, a spree killing that took place days before investigators say he assassinated a MIT professor in his home, declared in a short video recovered by federal investigators.

The gunman’s words, which were recorded in his native Portuguese and translated in English in transcripts released by the United States Attorney’s Office for Massachusetts on Tuesday, were part of what investigators call a “series of short videos,” recovered after Neves Valente took his own life on Dec. 18.

In the whiny, seemingly self-serving confessions, the gunman, a former Brown graduate student, did not reveal a motive for his deadly rampage, but complained of a shrapnel injury he suffered when he opened fire at the Rhode Island Ivy League on Dec. 13. Three days later, he then executed nuclear scientist Nuno Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. The 47-year-old Lorero was a professor of nuclear science, engineering and physics and also director of MIT’s plasma science and fusion center. He was also, like his killer, a native of Portugal, but the newly released video transcripts do not reveal a motive for the cold-blooded assassination.

“He exposed his true nature when he blamed innocent, unarmed children for their deaths at his hand and grumbled about a self-inflicted injury he suffered when he shot the MIT professor at close range,” U.S. Attorney Leah Foley said Tuesday.

Valente recorded the videos at a Salem, New Hampshire, storage facility after his bloody attack led to a six-day manhunt by investigators that ended with the discovery of his body in a unit that he said in a video he had rented three years earlier. In one video, he wondered aloud if he could shoot himself, musing: “Let’s see if I’ve got the balls to do this to myself now, because it was hard as hell to do it to all of these people, man.”