U.S. Federal prosecutors on Tuesday disclosed transcripts from four video recordings made by Claudio Neves Valente, the gunman responsible for last month’s fatal mass shooting at Brown University, in which he admitted to planning the attack months in advance.
The recordings, recovered by the FBI from an electronic device, were found in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, where Valente was discovered dead from a self-inflicted gunshot on December 18, concluding a six-day manhunt.
Reuters reported on Wednesday that Valente, 48, a Portuguese national and former doctoral student in physics at Brown two decades ago, entered an engineering building on the Ivy League campus on December 13 and opened fire with a handgun, killing two students and injuring nine others, according to Providence police.
Following the Brown attack, Valente travelled to Massachusetts, where he killed Nuno Loureiro, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Authorities later revealed that the two men had once been classmates in Lisbon. Investigators have not yet determined a motive for either shooting.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Boston, Valente “admitted that he had been planning the Brown University shooting for a long time.”
In the videos, prosecutors say, he refers to a previous eye injury caused by a shell casing and notes that he had “already planned this for a little more” than “six semesters.”
Beyond this, his statements remain disjointed and elliptical, never explicitly mentioning the act of shooting or killing, and offering little insight into what drove his actions.
“I don't know if there are any kind of implications of what I wanted to do or not,” Valente says in one recording. “It was all incompetent, but at least something was done. ... The only objective was to [pause] leave more or less on my own terms and -- and it's -- it's already long overdue.”
He also alludes to vague, unspecified grievances but expresses no remorse. “To say that I was extraordinarily satisfied, no, but I also don't regret what I did,” he adds.
“I am not going to apologise, because during my lifetime no one sincerely apologised to me.”
Federal prosecutors emphasised that, based on the evidence collected to date, there is no indication of ongoing threats to public safety from Valente’s actions.
The investigation into his motives, however, continues.
The release of the transcripts represents the first direct statements from Valente since the shootings and sheds light on the premeditated nature of the attacks, even as questions about why he committed them remain unanswered. - January 7, 2025
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