FBI Says Brown Shooter Was Fueled by Paranoia, Grievances

Investigators say the man behind December's deadly Brown University rampage was fueled less by ideology than by a long-simmering sense of personal failure, the Guardian reports. The FBI on Wednesday said 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national, saw Brown and an MIT professor he later killed as stand-ins for what he believed the world had taken from him. Two Brown students were killed and nine others wounded in the campus shooting; the MIT professor, Nuno Loureiro, was shot days later at his home outside Boston, the AP reports. "He appeared to struggle with how he viewed his life achievements and felt he was considerably marginalized by others," the FBI's report states.

According to the FBI's Boston division, Neves Valente acted alone and began mapping out the Brown attack in 2022, the year he bought the weapons he'd eventually use, the New York Times reports. Once a Brown physics student who left the university in 2001 and later returned to the US as a permanent resident, he was unemployed at the time of the shootings and recorded video and audio confessions afterward, expressing no remorse. Agents described him as isolated, with no close contacts likely to spot warning signs, and said his grandiose self-image, increasing paranoia, and perceived injustices left him both mentally unstable and intent on dying. He was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a New Hampshire storage unit days after the attacks.