Two violent attacks in New England left a community reeling last week after a gunman opened fire inside a Brown University engineering classroom, killing two students and wounding nine others during finals week. Authorities later linked that classroom massacre to the deadly shooting of an MIT professor two days afterward, and the suspect was found dead in a New Hampshire storage unit as investigators closed the manhunt.
Law enforcement has identified the suspected assailant as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national and former Brown student who was discovered in Salem, New Hampshire, with self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Officials say Valente rented a car seen near both scenes and that investigators recovered weapons and other evidence at the storage unit that tie him to the attacks.
As is often the tragic pattern, the most important question — why? — remains unanswered. Investigators admit they do not yet know a motive and have said there are “a lot of unknowns,” even as a private tipster nicknamed “John” helped break the case by linking surveillance footage and license-plate photos to Valente.
Brown and local authorities tried to reassure the campus, but the facts expose glaring security gaps: the older section of the engineering building where the attack occurred has few if any cameras, and the assailant appears to have entered through a door that faces a residential street. Universities boast of harmless-sounding safety plans until tragedy proves those plans are often paper shields when it counts.
We are also owed frank answers about how someone with this background lived and moved in our communities. Reports show Valente became a U.S. permanent resident years ago, which raises legitimate questions about vetting, background checks, and how we track potentially dangerous individuals once they float through the system. Americans who insist on secure borders and common-sense immigration enforcement are not being paranoid when incidents like this keep occurring.
Credit where it’s due: dogged detectives, ordinary citizens, and modern investigative tools like license-plate readers and surveillance footage ultimately closed the manhunt. That said, the investigation was muddled by premature public announcements and leaked leads that distracted from the effort — a reminder that politics and social-media grandstanding have no place in active criminal probes.
If universities truly care about student safety they will stop subsidizing woke optics and start hardening campuses: more reliable cameras where students learn, better coordination with local law enforcement, clearer access control to older buildings, and the freedom to consider commonsense measures that actually deter attackers. Parents and taxpayers should demand real accountability from campus administrators who have been too quick to lecture and too slow to secure.
We mourn the lives lost — promising students and a respected scientist — and we grieve for the families and classmates left behind. The pain of Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov’s families is real, and their names deserve remembrance, not politicking; what they also deserve is a nation that learns hard lessons and acts to prevent the next avoidable massacre. Lawmakers, university leaders, and law enforcement must stop treating safety like a PR problem and start treating it like what it is: a moral duty to protect innocent life.
