2025 Brown University shooting

• 1. Introduction

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  The 2025 Brown University shooting began shortly after 4 p.m. on the 13th of December 2025, on the second day of final examination week. Brown is an Ivy League university in the College Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island. It owns more than 230 buildings and enrolled about 11,500 undergraduate, graduate, and medical students in 2023. By the time police arrived at one of those buildings, the gunman had already fled. Nobody yet knew his name. The days that followed raise several questions. Who was he, and how did a tip from an unlikely source finally identify him? Why did a second killing, in another state, turn out to be linked to the first? And what, if anything, explains why it happened at all?

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• 2. Room 166

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  Room 166 is a first-floor lecture hall with 186 seats, inside the Barus and Holley Building. The building belongs to the School of Engineering and also houses the physics department. On the afternoon of the shooting, a 21-year-old teaching assistant was leading an optional review session there for an economics final exam. The building was unlocked.

  According to the teaching assistant, the masked gunman walked in just as the session was ending and fired 40 rounds. The two students who died had either been sitting on the left side of the room or walking up the aisle as he entered.

  Authorities do not know how the gunman got into the building. They said he moved through a part of it with limited surveillance cameras and left on the Hope Street side.

  At 4:22 p.m., the university's Public Safety and Emergency Management office sent its first alert about "an active shooter near Barus & Holley Engineering". At 4:50 p.m., a second alert wrongly said a suspect was in custody, and a correction followed 20 minutes later. At 5:27 p.m., a third message reported gunfire near Governor Street. The university retracted it at 6:10 p.m., calling the report "unfounded". Through all of this, the real gunman had fled the scene, and authorities did not yet know who he was.

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• 3. The Wounded and the Dead

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  Ella Cook was a parishioner at the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama, and vice president of Brown's College Republicans. She was one of two students killed. The other was Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an Uzbek American and a recent graduate of Midlothian High School in Chesterfield County, Virginia.

  Nine more students were wounded, which brought the total number of people shot to 11. All nine were taken to Rhode Island Hospital, which is affiliated with the university. One of them had a shrapnel injury and went home after a few hours.

  Durham Academy in Durham, North Carolina, said its community was rallying around one of the wounded, Kendall Turner, her classmates, and her loved ones. Turner had recently graduated from the school, and at that point she was in critical condition.

  Two more patients were discharged on the 16th and the 17th of December. On the 18th, the remaining six were reported to be in stable condition. By the 5th of January, all nine students had been treated and released.

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• 4. The Manhunt

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  More than 400 police officers responded to the scene, joined by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the FBI. Both of the FBI's planes were unavailable, so its evidence response team drove overnight from Virginia and arrived at 9:00 a.m. on the 14th of December. Rhode Island governor Dan McKee also ordered the Rhode Island State Police to support the effort.

  In the first hours, investigators found shell casings and believed the shooter had used a handgun. Shortly after a 10 p.m. press conference, the Providence Police Department released security footage of the suspect. Two days later, Providence mayor Smiley still called it the "clearest picture we have of the individual we believe to be responsible". Police also asked nearby residents to share video from smart doorbells.

  Snow fell overnight and hampered the collection of physical evidence such as fingerprints. The next morning, acting on information from Providence Police, the FBI raided a hotel in Rhode Island and detained a man. Agents also raided a home in another state. The man was released the same day. Rhode Island attorney general Peter Neronha said "there is no basis to consider him a person of interest", and the ballistics from the scene did not match the gun in the man's possession.

  On the 15th of December, police released images and three more videos of the suspect. One showed him in a black beanie, a mask, a green jacket, and black gloves. Providence police chief Col. Oscar Perez said the shooter had used a 9mm firearm. The FBI offered a $50,000 reward.

  On the 17th of December, police released a street map showing where the suspect was confirmed to have been on the day of the shooting. Authorities also revealed that they had found DNA and fingerprint evidence on shell casings from the scene.

  The breakthrough came from a Reddit post about a suspicious vehicle near the area. Neronha said the resulting tip "blew this case wide open". The post pointed investigators toward a gray Nissan Sentra with Florida license plates. Its author was a homeless Brown graduate who had met the suspect several times in Providence. Known only as "John", he sat down with police on the 17th and picked out the car in surveillance footage.

  That identification let police follow the car using Flock Safety cameras. The rental agreement and CCTV footage from the Alamo Rent a Car in downtown Boston, where the car was rented, then gave them the suspect's name and face. Mayor Brett Smiley later wrote to FBI director Kash Patel asking that John receive the full $50,000 reward.

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• 5. A Brilliant Student

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  Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente was born on the 22nd of January 1977 in Torres Novas, Portugal. He studied at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon from 1995 until 2000 and reportedly avoided his parents. He graduated first in his class, ahead of a fellow student named Nuno Loureiro.

  In September 2000, Valente enrolled in the physics PhD program at Brown University and lived in Providence. He took a leave of absence in April 2001 and formally withdrew in July 2003. Former classmates at the Instituto described him as "brilliant" but arrogant.

  Scott Watson, a physics professor at Syracuse University, was a close friend and former classmate of Valente's at Brown. Watson said Valente was "often unhappy and even angry, complaining that classes were too easy and that the food on Brown's campus was subpar".

  After leaving Brown, Valente returned to Portugal and worked as an IT specialist for SAPO. He later won the Diversity Immigrant Visa lottery and obtained United States permanent residency in April 2017. He had no criminal record. His last known address was in Ives Estates, Florida, a working-class neighborhood.

  On the 28th of November 2025, more than two weeks before the shooting, several people noticed him on the Brown campus and found his behavior suspicious.

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• 6. Brookline and Salem

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  At around 8:30 p.m. on the 15th of December, MIT physics professor Nuno Loureiro was shot in the foyer of the apartment building where he lived in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was taken to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and pronounced dead on the morning of the 16th. Loureiro had directed the MIT Plasma Science and Fusion Center since 2024.

  Loureiro and Valente had attended the same engineering and technology school at the University of Lisbon. Authorities linked a rental car to both shootings. They also determined that one of the guns found on Valente's body was used to kill Loureiro.

  On the 18th of December, law enforcement sources said the Brown shooting might be connected to Loureiro's death. That same day, police holding an arrest warrant in the Brown case went to an Extra Space Storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, nearly 355 feet from the Massachusetts border. Inside, they found 48-year-old Valente dead, with two guns on his body. Perez said he had killed himself. The autopsy found he had been dead for two days, and officials said the suicide weapon was the gun used at Brown.

  On the 6th of January 2026, the Justice Department released a transcript of video recordings found in the storage facility. In them, Valente confessed to the murders and said he had been planning them for years. He did not give a motive.

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• 7. Reactions and Responses

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  Brown University provost Francis J. Doyle III canceled classes and exams for the rest of the fall term. Columbia University, Cornell University, and the American Mathematical Society issued statements condemning the shooting and offering support to the Brown community.

  Brown police chief Rodney Chatman was temporarily replaced by former Providence police chief Hugh Clements. Chatman had earlier been criticized over his handling of threats and incidents, and the police union had given him a vote of no confidence. The Brown Daily Herald also published allegations that his department tolerated harassment based on gender and sexual orientation.

  On the afternoon of the shooting, President Donald Trump said, "Things can happen. So to the nine injured - get well fast; and to the families of those two that are no longer with us, I pay my deepest regards and respects from the United States of America." After Valente's body was found on the 18th, Trump ordered Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to suspend the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, which awards up to 50,000 visas per year by lottery. The stated reason was that Valente had gained residency through it in 2017. Because Congress created the program, the legality of the order was unclear.

  Massachusetts governor Maura Healey expressed support for the victims. Alabama senators Katie Britt and Tommy Tuberville mourned Ella Cook, and Uzbekistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs mourned Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov.

  The 14th of December was the 13th anniversary of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. The nonprofit Sandy Hook Promise said of Brown, "We cannot allow this to keep happening."

  In The Atlantic, Juliette Kayyem placed the shooting within a pattern of gun violence in American schools, and Lucy Feldman did the same in TIME. Xochitl Gonzalez, a Brown trustee and alumna, wrote in The Atlantic about the deadlock in American gun politics. Brown professors Philip Chan and Amy Nunn argued in USA Today for rethinking gun violence through community and school-based mental health efforts.

  Other writers asked why it took so long to find the gunman. Jim Geraghty of The Washington Post pointed to the role of surveillance cameras, which are common but did not fully cover the Brown campus. Brandon del Pozo, a professor at Brown's Warren Alpert Medical School, cited "the odds and a little intelligent preparation on the part of the assailant" and said the delay could not be blamed on law enforcement.

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• 8. Rumors Online

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  While police searched, social media filled with accusations. Right-wing figures repeatedly stated, without evidence, that a Palestinian Brown University student was the shooter. They included anonymous accounts as well as venture capitalist Shaun Maguire, hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, activist Laura Loomer, podcaster Tim Pool, and senior Justice Department official Harmeet Dhillon.

  Maguire also wrongly described Nuno Loureiro as Jewish and a supporter of Israel. Loomer baselessly claimed the shooter had shouted "Allahu Akbar" before firing, and Valente refuted this in his recorded confession. Republican officials, including Senator Tommy Tuberville, claimed without evidence that Ella Cook was killed because she was vice president of the Brown University College Republicans.

  By the 16th of December, Brown had deleted the wrongly accused student's profile pages from its website to guard against harassment and doxxing. In a statement published on the 19th, the student called the days afterward "an unimaginable nightmare". The student's legal representatives said racism against Palestinians was at the core of the accusations.

  Rhode Island senator Sheldon Whitehouse criticized the theories at a Senate Judiciary Committee meeting that month. He told those who believed them to "please just knock it off." After Valente's responsibility became clear, Rhode Island police said the online speculation had not helped and had complicated the investigation.

  A second wave of theories tied Loureiro's murder to nine other deaths and disappearances of scientists in the United States. That speculation led the FBI to open a probe to look for connections between the cases.

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