Around 4:00 pm EST on Saturday, December 13th, an armed man entered through the unlocked doors of the Barus & Holley engineering building located on the outskirts of Brown’s campus. He opened fire, killing two and injuring nine. The two victims have been identified as sophomore Ella Cook and freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov. There were around 60 students in the building for an economics study session. In response to this tragic event, finals were canceled, and students made early plans to return home (NBC News). Junior Annalise Klecha remarked, “Since elementary school, we’ve been practicing lockdown and shelter-in-place drills for similar situations. Still, that doesn’t make it any less jarring and devastating to hear about a shooting so close to home.”
The search for the shooter took a bit more than five days. The police started with little footage as the Barus & Holley did not have many cameras, only publicly releasing two video clips of the suspect. Their original person of interest was released on December 15th, as their evidence ruled him out as a suspect (NY Times). On December 16th, the authorities received an anonymous tip pointing them to a Reddit post. The post stated, “I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a gray Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental” (PBS News). The following day, the author of the post called the authorities, recounting his encounter with a suspicious man in the bathroom and how he subsequently followed him, circling the block. After tracing the license plate, the authorities honed in on the name Claudio Manuel Neves Valente. From there, the police found him dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire on December 18th and linked him to the murder of respected MIT professor and physicist Nuno F.G. Loureiro on December 15th. It was revealed that Neves Valente and Loureiro studied at the same university in Portugal, and Neves Valente was a student at Brown from 2000-2001 to study physics (PBS News).
Falling a day short of the 13th Anniversary of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the nation is yet again grappling with another tragedy. “The shooting at Brown University is tragic,” history teacher Mr. Vander Molen commented. “Schools should be places of learning and safety. While I support the Second Amendment and lawful gun ownership, events like this make it increasingly difficult to ignore the role that gun violence plays in disrupting educational spaces. We must continue to ask whether our laws are doing enough to protect students while respecting constitutional rights.” In the meantime, school shootings continue to be the norm while the nation grieves the loss and supports the families of Miss Cook and Mr. Umurzokov.
