BOSTON, April 29 (Reuters) – The FBI said on \u200bWednesday it had determined the suspected gunman behind December’s fatal mass shooting at Brown University \u200cspent years planning the attack and was “driven by an accumulation of grievances that he collected throughout his life.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The FBI’s Boston division detailed investigators’ assessment in a joint announcement with federal prosecutors in Massachusetts after concluding a significant portion of their \u200bprobe into the accused gunman, Claudio Neves Valente.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Authorities say the 48-year-old Portuguese national slipped into an \u200bengineering building on the Ivy League campus on December 13 and opened fire \u2060with a handgun, killing two students and injuring nine others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He went on to kill a Massachusetts Institute \u200bof Technology professor, Nuno Loureiro, in a separate shooting at his home outside Boston on December 15, authorities \u200bsay. Neves Valente was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound on December 18 at a New Hampshire storage facility following a manhunt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Prosecutors had in January released transcripts of video recordings Neves Valente made before his death in which he admitted to \u200bplanning the attack. But prosecutors said he did not provide a motive for targeting his victims.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Investigators have \u200bin the months since pored over thousands of files of surveillance footage, analyzed 815 videos and 1,327 audio files found \u200con \u2060Neves Valente’s electronic devices and conducted more than 260 interviews, the FBI said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The FBI said that Neves Valente in the recordings said he began planning the attack in 2022, when he first acquired a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The FBI said it determined he acted alone and his victims were “symbolic in nature,” \u200bsaying Brown University and Loureiro \u200brepresented to Neves Valente “his \u2060personal failures and injustices he perceived were inflicted by others over time.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Neves Valente attended Brown two decades ago after completing a physics program at Instituto Superior \u200bTecnico in Portugal, which he attended with Loureiro. He withdrew from Brown in \u200b2001 and \u2060left the United States.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He later obtained lawful permanent residency in the U.S. in 2017 while living in Florida. He was unemployed when the shootings occurred, and the FBI said his “inflated sense of self contributed to interpersonal conflicts \u2060in his \u200blife and led him to believe he was being treated \u200bunjustly.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The agency said it believed that as his failures outweighed his successes, Neves Valente’s “paranoia increased, compounding his continued inability to thrive, leading \u200bto him being mentally unwell and committed to dying.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n