Brown suspect was once a top student in Portugal with a promising future

Claudio Manuel Neves Valente had been an academic powerhouse in his home country of Portugal.

Decades before this week’s manhunt through New England ended with the discovery of his body in a storage facility, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente had been an academic powerhouse in his home country of Portugal. Enrolled at one of the country’s most prestigious engineering schools, Neves Valente graduated at the top of his class, seemingly poised for a bright future.

Now, Neves Valente is dead at age 48, suspected of committing two shocking acts of violence — and authorities in both the United States and Portugal are looking for a motive that could explain his actions.

Officials believe Neves Valente was behind a mass shooting that killed two students and injured nine other people on Saturday at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He is also suspected of fatally shooting 47-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro at Loureiro’s home in the Boston suburb of Brookline on Monday.

The shootings gripped residents of Rhode Island and Massachusetts as days passed without anyone in custody. Then on Thursday, authorities announced they had closed in on a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, where they found Neves Valente’s body, who appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Little is known about how he chose his targets, though Neves Valente has past connections to Brown and to Loureiro.