Brown University killer died two days before his remains were found in storage unit: autopsy

Brown University and MIT professor killer Claudio Neves Valente had been dead for two days when police found his lifeless body inside a New Hampshire storage facility following a nearly weeklong manhunt.

Valente died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head on Tuesday — two days before police found the 48-year-old Portuguese national dead inside the Salem storage unit with a satchel and two firearms Thursday night, the New Hampshire attorney generals office announced Friday.

His death was ruled a suicide, according to the autopsy report.

Valente — who attended Brown more than two decades ago as a PhD student — was identified as the gun-toting madman who sprayed bullets into a lecture hall at the Rhode Island Ivy League school Saturday, killing two students and wounding nine more, police said.

Students Ella Cook, a 19-year-old sophomore from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an 18-year-old Uzbek American freshman, were killed in the mass shooting at the elite Providence university.

The former physics grad student, who spent only three semesters at the prestigious institution before dropping out in 2003, then traveled 50 miles and shot dead Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro, 47, in his $1.4 million Brookline townhouse two days later, authorities said.

Valente and Lourerio had once been classmates at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal. 

Despite the apparent ties to Brown and the MIT professor, authorities said the assailants motives in the disturbing killing spree, which sparked a massive manhunt, remain a mystery.

“I don’t think we have any idea why now, or why Brown, or why these students, why this classroom,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha told reporters at a Thursday press conference.

He said the deranged suspect, who traveled from Florida, made bizarre “barking” noises when he walked into the Brown lecture hall and opened fire, unloading more than 40 rounds on terrified students.

“There are some witnesses who said he said nothing,” Neronha said, adding, “There are some that say he made a barking noise.”

“Don’t ask me. I don’t know why. And that’s it. There is no other spoken word beyond that, that we are aware of.’

Valente reportedly rented the storage unit in November and a gray Nissan with Florida plates Dec. 1 — a car that was spotted multiple times in the area around Brown’s campus through Dec. 12.

After the deadly university shooting, he switched licenses plates and traveled to Massachusetts Monday.