How attacks on Brown, MIT professor unfolded

Investigators are working to trace the steps of Claudio Neves Valente.

- BY LEAH WILLINGHAM

OFFICERS in Salem, N.H., search Thursday for the Brown University shooter.

(REBA SALDANHA Associated Press)

Just before Thanksgiving, Claudio Neves Valente checked into a Boston hotel and traveled to Brown University in Rhode Island, where he had studied physics 25 years earlier.

The drive to Providence was short, and in the days that followed, the 48-year-old Portuguese national returned to the campus again and again. On most trips, he drifted around Brown and the surrounding neighborhoods in a gray Nissan rental car with Florida plates. A custodian noticed him inside an engineering building while most students were home on the holiday break and spotted him again three days later, according to authorities.

Investigators say that on Dec. 13, Neves Valente returned to Brown once more, this time with a 9-millimeter handgun, and he opened fire in a lecture hall in an attack that killed two students and injured nine others. He got away in the ensuing chaos, and two days later showed up at the home of a Massachusetts professor who was a classmate of his in Portugal in the 1990s, and fatally shot him too, investigators said.

In their frantic search for the Brown attacker, authorities released video in the hopes that someone might recognize him. But his face was always hidden behind a mask, with a black beanie covering his head.

"I wish the video could speak, and then I'd have the answers I need," a frustrated Providence police chief, Col. Oscar Perez, told reporters at one of the week's news briefings.

Investigators are still trying to figure out much of what Neves Valente was doing in New England in the weeks before the shooting, but they know he repeatedly visited the Ivy League school's Providence campus. He was spotted on surveillance video at a Boston rental car agency as early as Nov. 17.