Holed up in a Salem, New Hampshire, storage locker, expecting the police to burst through the door any minute, Claudio Neves Valente switched on a video camera, according to federal prosecutors.
His first thoughts after allegedly committing a shooting rampage that left two Brown University undergraduates and an M.I.T. professor dead went not to the people he had killed and injured, but to himself. Specifically his own right eye, apparently wounded when he shot one of his victims at close range.
“It’s a shell casing, bounced there,” he complains as he apparently checks his face in the frame.
In a series of short video clips, the suspect in the Brown University mass shooting confessed to the attacks in Providence and to killing an MIT professor, but expressed no remorse.
Crime scene investigators recovered the videos after Valente took his own life, according to Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Leah B. Foley. The videos were largely in Portuguese, the suspect’s native language, and were later translated by federal authorities.
Transcripts released late Tuesday suggest he had been planning the shootings for a long time, although it’s not entirely clear how long. “Six months,” he says. “Or six semesters.” He said he had been renting the storage unit for three years.
Chillingly, the suspect claims Dec. 13 was not the first time he roamed the Brown campus armed. “I had plenty of opportunities, especially this semester,” he says. “But I always chickened out.”
Valente says he finally found the courage to follow through on his deadly plan after a young man confronted him at the Barus & Holley engineering building hours before the shooting.
Noting that the man who confronted him had noted down the license plate of his car, the suspect expressed surprise he was able to evade capture for days.
“I honestly never thought it would take them so long to find me,” he says in the transcript.
Although he apparently knew police were closing in, he appears to have hesitated to turn his gun on himself: “Let’s see if I’ve got the balls to do this to myself now, because it was hard as hell to do it to all of these people, man,” he says. “It was hard as hell.”
The transcripts come as Brown University prepares for more students to return to campus from winter break.
“We recognize that reading the transcripts released today of videos made by the suspect identified by the government is likely to intensify feelings of anxiety, stress and concern for many Brown community members,” read a statement issued by Brown University spokesman Brian E. Clark.
Clark said the contents of the tapes reinforce Brown’s determination to address campus safety concerns.
“We have stated unequivocally and will assert again: what happened on Dec. 13 should never happen again – at Brown or anywhere,” Clark said.
The tapes do not reveal a specific motive for the attacks. Investigators are still trying to piece together that part of the puzzle. On the tapes, Valente claims he intended to send three final emails explaining his actions. Those email messages have not yet been released, nor have law enforcement officials said if they have recovered them.
The suspect briefly studied as a graduate student at Brown 25 years ago, but he does not explain on the tapes whether that experience may have motivated his shooting spree.
“I have no hatred towards America, no hatred at all,” Valente insists. “This was an issue of opportunity.”
Among the Brown students who tragically became his targets of opportunity: Ella Cook, a Brown University sophomore, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, a first-year student, both killed during an exam review session in the Barus & Holley building. Nine other students were injured, all of whom have been discharged from Rhode Island Hospital.
On the video, Valente denies reports he shouted anything political or religious as he opened fire in the Brown lecture hall. Instead, he says he may have shouted in surprise when he entered the lecture hall, guns blazing, only to see no one inside.
“I must have made the exclamation, ‘Oh No!’ or something like that, to express that it was empty,” he said.
Then he realized students were hiding under their desks.
“They were stupid,” he says, laughing to himself. “There was an emergency exit on the lower right side…they could have perfectly left through there.”
Federal officials have inferred that Valente was simply unhinged. “He exposed his true nature when he blamed innocent, unarmed children for their deaths at his hand and grumbled about a self-inflicted injury,” said Foley, the Massachusetts U.S. Attorney.
The suspect is no clearer about his motives for allegedly killing MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro two days after the Brown campus shooting.
Authorities say Valente lay in wait for the professor at his Brookline, Mass, home. The two men had studied in the same academic program in Portugal from 1995 to 2000, according to prosecutors.
The Providence police chief continued to insist there is no ongoing public safety threat.
In a statement issued after the release of the transcripts, Col. Oscar Perez said: “We recognize the profound impact these crimes have had on the victims’ families and the Brown and MIT communities.”
This story was originally published by Ocean State Media. It was shared as part of the New England News Collaborative.