Brown Univ. Shooting LINKED To MIT Fusion Professor’s Assassination
In mid-December 2025, two shocking acts of violence in the New England region — separated by just two days and about 50 miles — left communities reeling and investigators piecing together an unexpected link.
On December 13, 2025, a gunman opened fire in the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. The attack occurred during final exam preparations, killing two students — Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov — and wounding nine others. The campus went into lockdown as authorities launched a multi-agency manhunt for the suspect.
Just two days later, on December 15, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a 47-year-old renowned physicist and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, was fatally shot in the foyer of his apartment building in Brookline, Massachusetts, near Boston. Loureiro, originally from Portugal, was a leading expert in plasma physics and nuclear fusion research. He had joined MIT in 2016 and was widely praised as a brilliant scientist, mentor, and leader whose work advanced the quest for clean, sustainable fusion energy — often described as a potential game-changer for humanity’s energy future.
Initially, the two incidents appeared unrelated. However, by December 18, authorities announced a direct connection: the same suspect was believed responsible for both attacks. The individual was identified as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national and former Brown graduate student (enrolled briefly in the early 2000s before withdrawing). Investigators discovered that Valente and Loureiro had overlapped as students in the same physics program at Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, Portugal, during the late 1990s.
Evidence linking the crimes included a gray Nissan rental car spotted near both scenes (with swapped license plates suggesting efforts to evade detection), financial records, security footage, and ballistics matching the weapons later found with the suspect.
After a five-day manhunt, Valente was located in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, where he was found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound. He had been deceased for several days by the time authorities arrived.
The motive remains unclear and under investigation. Some observers noted the competitive academic environment in their shared Portuguese program, while others pointed to Valente’s unsuccessful time at Brown. Authorities emphasized that the Brown shooting targeted a classroom indiscriminately, while the attack on Loureiro appeared more personal and targeted — almost like an assassination.
The tragedies devastated two prestigious academic communities. Brown University mourned its students and launched safety reviews, while MIT remembered Loureiro as an “imaginative scholar” whose loss reverberated across the global fusion research field.
These linked events serve as a somber reminder of how past academic connections can intersect with violence in unforeseen ways, leaving lasting scars on campuses dedicated to discovery and progress. Investigations continue to uncover why these events unfolded as they did.