What 4 videos left by the suspected shooter at Brown University and of an MIT professor confirm – and still don’t answer

Claudio Neves Valente walks on Dec. 1 at a rental car facility in Boston. (Providence Police Department via CNN Newsource)

In four short videos on an electronic device found with his body, the suspect in last month’s fatal shootings at Brown University and of an MIT professor laid out a patchwork of details about the attacks.

Woven among his confessions to the crimes and winding related thoughts, several nuggets match facts that emerged as authorities were identifying Claudio Neves Valente, 48, as wanted in the killings of students Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, and Professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro.

As the videos’ transcripts – translated from Portuguese and released this week by the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts – raise fresh questions, they also intersect with key known elements of the case. Here’s how some of the suspect’s own words flesh out – or further blur – the crimes that rocked Greater Boston and a manhunt that captured national attention.

Video 1 transcript

6 mins, 26 secs

As he’ll more clearly explain, Neves Valente was hurt during one of the shootings. His eye injury was not shared publicly, if known at all, by law enforcement between the Brown attack on December 13 and the discovery five days later of the suspect dead by suicide at a storage facility.

The suspect seems to reveal how long he planned at least one of the attacks. But even as he speaks of “final conclusions” and his “only objective,” he offers no motive for the shootings at this or at any point in the videos; it’s a critical element of the case still under scrutiny by federal investigators.

Neves Valente doesn’t go into what exactly he “had to put up with” before pivoting to his location: the storage space he says he rented far longer than the few weeks investigators had thought.

After killing his former academic colleague Loureiro on Dec. 15 in Brookline, Massachusetts – about 50 miles (80 km) away from the Brown attack in Providence, Rhode Island – the suspect immediately drove about 40 miles (64 km) and swiped into the storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, according to Rhode Island’s attorney general. It appears he never swiped out.

From Entroncamento in central Portugal, Neves Valente was a “very bright” but reclusive young man who was estranged from his family and whose mother once told a neighbour her son “needs help, but he doesn’t want to get it,” said his former neighbours in Lisbon, where he and Loureiro both were students between 1995 and 2000 at a prestigious engineering school.

Neves Valente began studying at Brown in 2000 on an F-1 visa – a non-immigrant visa for full-time international students – U.S. Attorney Leah Foley of Massachusetts has said. He likely took physics classes in the Barus & Holley building where the December shooting unfolded.

Right before the gunfire at Brown, the suspect stopped in a bathroom at the Barus & Holley building, where a man – later identified as John, per a police affidavit – noticed his clothes seemed inadequate for the cold weather. John earlier had seen nearby a “grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental,” the document states, and he soon saw the suspect leave the building and appear to unlock the Nissan with a key fob.

John stayed outside as the man suddenly turned from the vehicle and walked in a different direction, then circled back before changing directions whenever he saw John, the witness told investigators. At one point, John confronted the man, asking him why he kept circling the block, the affidavit says. The man responded: “Why are you harassing me?” it says. John then walked down the street as the man walked toward the car, the affidavit says.

Authorities also mapped the suspect’s winding path right before and after the attack around the Barus & Holley building based on footage from neighbours’ cameras and released the details during the manhunt.

Stumbles and hurdles in the search for the Brown gunman, then the MIT professor’s killer, meant the manhunt dragged on for days. From the dearth of surveillance cameras in the Brown building where the shooting erupted to authorities’ early identification of the wrong man, plus behind-the-scenes friction between local law enforcement and the FBI, to the crush of tips investigators had to sift through, five days elapsed between the first shot and the discovery of the suspect’s body.

The suspect “grumbled about a self-inflicted injury he suffered when he shot the MIT professor at close range,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts said in releasing the transcripts.

Throughout the videos, the suspect “showed no remorse,” federal prosecutors said. “(O)n the contrary, he exposed his true nature when he blamed innocent, unarmed children for their deaths at his hand.” The suspect did not give any further details about prior apologies he’d gotten or his suspicions as a young child.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts has stated it would provide further updates as new information becomes available and victims are properly notified. A spokesperson declined to comment Thursday on the existence or contents of the emails.

Many mass shooters have shown a fascination with or been fixated on other mass shooters and their lives out of a need to feel understood, to have role models and to be part of a community, according to experts in the psychology of school shooters. Neves Valente seems to nod to the culture that fawns over mass attackers while insisting he wants no part of it.

“Hopefully, they’re going to capture this animal,” U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters Dec. 15 from the Oval Office, adding it’s “always difficult” to manage an investigation of this kind. Trump also deflected questions about why the manhunt was taking so long, saying the feds “came in after the fact.”

“This was a school problem. They had their own guards, they had their own police, they had their own everything,” he said. “But you’d have to ask that question, really to the school, not the FBI.”

Before arriving late Dec. 15 to the storage facility, the suspect’s rental car was seen several times around Brown between Dec. 1, when he got it in Boston, and Dec. 12, including by John. Between the university shooting and the professor’s killing, Neves Valente swapped its licence plates to an unregistered Maine plate. Still, the suspect parked his car outdoors at the storage facility, where he knew there’d be proof he swiped in.

Meanwhile, authorities plugged a description of the Nissan into a system run by Flock Safety that can read licence plates and identify other vehicle details, then match sightings of the same car, including with different tags. The technology helped locate the suspect, Providence’s police chief said.

Neves Valente also appears to portend his own manner of death.

Video 2 transcript

1 min, 3 secs

In the shortest of the four videos, the suspect focuses on his regrets amid his intercontinental life. His first stint at Brown was brief, “attending for only three semesters as a graduate student until taking a leave in 2001 and formally withdrawing effective July 31, 2003,” the school’s president wrote after his death.

The suspect re-entered the U.S. in 2017 via the diversity visa program, where a specified number of applicants from designated countries are admitted through a lottery system, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. He got permanent legal U.S. residency, known as a green card, and, at some point later, a Florida driver’s license.

Meanwhile, Neves Valente had not spoken with his parents in years, a former neighbour told CNN. At one point, his mother confided to the neighbour her fear he would sell his Lisbon apartment and disappear, which the neighbour says eventually happened.

It is not clear whether or how Neves Valente and Loureiro may have interacted during their time in the same Portuguese physics program and if they were in touch afterward. Loureiro graduated in 2000 with his physics degree and stayed on as a researcher before becoming a professor in 2016 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Loureiro, 47, was found wounded in the foyer of his condo building in Brookline, Massachusetts, a neighbour told the Boston Globe, and later died at a hospital. “There was security footage that captured (Neves Valente) within a half mile of the professor’s residence in Brookline, and there is video footage of him entering an apartment building in the location of the professor’s apartment,” said Foley, the US attorney for the District of Massachusetts.

Loureiro is believed to have been targeted, a law enforcement official said.

Video 3 transcript

2 mins, 11 secs

Suspects in some high-profile attacks have been described as having mental health problems, but that doesn’t mean their mental health issues are to blame for the killings, experts have said. Indeed, people with mental illness are much more likely to be victims, rather than perpetrators, of violence, studies show. Mental illness is a strong causal factor in suicides, studies show.

Federal officials released the transcripts Tuesday.

Video 4 transcript

1 min, 35 secs

“Allahu Akbar,” meaning “God is greater,” is used by Muslims in moments of celebration and gratitude. The phrase also sometimes is used as a battle cry and has been employed by those with a nefarious agenda to instill fear of anyone who utters it and to raise concerns about Islam itself, according to Muslim scholars and civil rights advocates.

It was about 4 p.m. when a 21-year-old teaching assistant was wrapping a review session with a reported 60 or so students in the Barus & Holley building’s room 166, one of its largest classrooms. Joseph Oduro heard shots in the hall before the gunman entered his room through a door at the back, locked eyes with the economics teaching assistant, yelled something incomprehensible, then “just started shooting,” Oduro said.

Some students escaped through other doors. Oduro and about 20 students ducked and huddled behind a 10-foot-long desk at the front of the auditorium, and he called 911, then waited what “felt like an eternity” for the gunfire to stop, he said. He didn’t lift his head until campus public safety officers arrived and told them it was safe to leave.

Two students were dead. One who hid with the TA was shot in her legs, Oduro said. Eight others were wounded.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, here are some resources that are available.

Canada Suicide Crisis Helpline (Call or text 988)

Crisis Services Canada (1-833-456-4566 or text 45645)

Kids Help Phone [phone])

If you need immediate assistance call 911 or go to the nearest hospital.