Key takeaways

• Police have identified former Brown student Claudio Neves Valente as the gunman who killed two students and injured nine others in a mass shooting at Brown University.
• Investigators say Valente also shot dead MIT professor Nuno Loureiro near Boston and later died by suicide in a New Hampshire storage unit after being tracked through tips, license plate data and rental car records.
• President Donald Trump has ordered an immediate suspension of the U.S. Diversity Visa, or green card lottery, which granted Valente permanent residency in 2017, putting the future of the program under legal and political scrutiny.
• The diversity visa lottery is a key legal pathway for migrants from high-demand countries such as Nepal, so the pause is creating new uncertainty for thousands of DV and EDV applicants.

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Authorities have identified 48-year-old Portuguese physicist Claudio Neves Valente as the gunman who killed two students and wounded nine others at Brown University in Providence, and as the suspect in the fatal shooting of MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro near Boston. Valente has been found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot in a New Hampshire storage unit, and the case has already prompted President Donald Trump to suspend the U.S. Diversity Visa, or green card lottery, that granted him permanent residency in 2017.

The Brown University attack took place on December 13 inside a crowded exam review session in the Barus & Holley engineering building, when a masked gunman entered a lecture hall and opened fire with a 9mm handgun. Two students, Ella Cook from Alabama and first-year Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov from Uzbekistan, have died, and nine classmates have been injured.

Two days later, MIT nuclear science professor Nuno Loureiro was shot multiple times outside his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, and later died in hospital, according to local prosecutors. Investigators say Loureiro and Valente, both Portuguese nationals, studied in the same program at Lisbon’s Instituto Superior Técnico in the late 1990s and believe the professor was specifically targeted.

For much of the week, police struggled to put a name to the Brown University shooter, releasing grainy surveillance videos and even detaining and then releasing an unrelated person of interest. A key break came when a Brown maintenance worker reported a license plate he had written down after a suspicious encounter in the same building; that plate led investigators to a rental car, hotel records and finally a Salem, New Hampshire storage unit, where officers found Valente dead alongside two firearms.

Officials say Valente is a former Brown physics PhD student who enrolled in 2000 and later withdrew, and they have found no criminal record for him in U.S. databases. Police and federal agents believe he acted alone in both the Brown and MIT shootings, but they have not yet identified a clear motive or any specific link to the students killed at Brown. Wikipedia+2Reuters+2

After Valente was publicly tied to the attacks, the Trump administration moved to suspend the Diversity Immigrant Visa lottery, often called the DV or EDV program, which issued the immigrant visa that became his green card in 2017. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said she has ordered immigration authorities to pause the congressionally created program at the president’s direction, even though it normally provides up to 50,000 green cards a year to people from underrepresented countries.

The diversity visa lottery is a major route for migrants from countries such as Nepal, where more than 57,000 people have gained U.S. green cards through the scheme since the mid-1990s, accounting for over a quarter of all Nepali green card holders in America. Community media and immigration advocates note that thousands of current DV winners, including many Nepalis, are now unsure whether their cases will keep moving while the suspension is challenged in court, because U.S. officials have not yet clarified how the pause will be applied.