On December 13, 2025, a gunman entered Brown University’s Engineering building during a student study session and opened fire, killing two students and wounding nine others. Two days later, on December 15, a prominent MIT physics professor, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, was shot at his home in Brookline and later died. Authorities announced on December 18 that the suspected attacker, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, bringing a tragic and chaotic five-day manhunt to a grim close.
Investigators say Valente was no stranger to Brown — he had been enrolled as a physics student in 2000–2001 and, according to federal filings, later obtained U.S. lawful permanent residency in 2017 through the Diversity Immigrant Visa program. Law enforcement tied him to both attacks through surveillance, rental car records and witness tips after images of the suspect were released. Motive remains murky, but the painstaking trail of evidence shows this was not a random, one-off act; he had been seen on or near campus in the weeks before December 13, which raises terrifying questions about how he was allowed to roam and survey our institutions.
Americans grieving for the students and the murdered professor deserve answers, not excuses. Brown officials have admitted the attack occurred in an older wing of the engineering building with few cameras, despite the university boasting thousands of cameras systemwide. That glaring security gap is emblematic of elite campuses that spend millions on diversity offices and virtue-signaling while leaving physical safety to chance.
This episode also forces a hard conversation about immigration policy and national security. Valente’s path into permanent residency via the green card lottery program underscores the problem with a system that hands residency by random chance rather than strict, merit-based vetting. In the wake of these murders the Biden administration’s lax approach — now being reversed by action at the direction of President Trump and Homeland Security — is the kind of common-sense correction the country has needed for years.
While politicians and pundits on the left reflexively lament “gun violence” without addressing the context, conservatives want both compassion for victims and practical solutions. That means tighter vetting of immigration pathways, more resources for campus safety and an honest look at how institutions track suspicious people on and around their grounds. If Brown’s leadership prioritized optics over locks and cameras, they must answer for it — parents and students deserve safe learning environments, not lectures about systemic grievances after a tragedy.
The law enforcement response deserves praise for piecing together leads under intense pressure, but we shouldn’t pretend the chaos of this manhunt wasn’t avoidable. Surveillance footage, a rental car with swapped plates, and public tips broke the case; why wasn’t a potential threat neutralized earlier when campus members reported someone lurking weeks before the attack? We need clear protocols for when suspicious activity is reported — protocols that empower, not muzzle, campus police and local authorities.
Make no mistake: the political class that runs our universities and controls immigration policy must be held to account. For too long they have trusted bureaucratic check-boxes and ideological talking points while ordinary Americans suffer the consequences. Conservative policy prescriptions — stronger vetting, bolstered campus security, and accountability for leaders who fail to protect students — are not partisan attacks, they are commonsense steps to prevent further bloodshed.
As communities mourn Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and the brilliant professor who lost his life, America must channel sorrow into action. We owe it to the victims and their families to demand transparency, fix glaring security failures, and make sure our borders and visa programs do not become backdoors for danger. Hardworking Americans who send their children to school should not return to campus fearing that ideology and mismanagement made their families vulnerable.
Let this tragedy be a turning point. If political leaders want to prove they care about safety, they will stop reflexively defending failed policies and instead adopt the tough, pragmatic measures that actually protect lives. The lives lost at Brown and the home of an MIT scientist are a painful reminder that freedom without security is a perilous illusion, and it’s time to put protection, common sense, and American sovereignty back at the top of our national priorities.
