Massachusetts
FBI: Man who killed Brown students, MIT professor targeted symbolic victims tied to grievances
BOSTON (AP) — Federal investigators say they believe the man who carried out a mass shooting at Brown University and later killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor did not act randomly.
Instead, former Brown student Claudio Neves Valente, 48, appeared to target places and people for what they represented in his own life — institutions and individuals he associated with personal failure, missed opportunity and perceived injustice.
In a detailed behavioral assessment released Wednesday, the FBI said Neves Valente, a Portuguese national, spent years planning the attack in isolation before killing two students and wounding nine others inside an engineering building on Dec. 13. Two days later, he killed MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. Neves Valente was later found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, ending a multistate search.
The FBI described a man who spent years in isolation, rarely staying in one place and lacking traditional support systems such as family, peers and authority figures who might have recognized warning signs and alerted law enforcement.
Over time, investigators said, he built a narrative of grievance and inadequacy, with “little to no opportunity for bystanders to observe and contextualize the significance of his behaviors.”
“He appeared to struggle with how he viewed his life achievements and felt he was considerably marginalized by others,” the FBI wrote in the report. “As his failures outweighed successes, his paranoia increased, compounding his continued inability to thrive and leading to him being mentally unwell and committed to dying.”
Authorities said the violence itself was “symbolic in nature.” Brown University and Loureiro, investigators wrote, represented to the shooter “his personal failures and injustices he perceived were inflicted by others over time.”
“By attacking them, Neves Valente was likely able to overcome his shame and envy by using violence to punish those communities that he perceived contributed to his downfall,” the FBI said.
Yet even as investigators laid out that framework, they acknowledged its limits, noting that only Neves Valente himself knew the full reason behind the attacks and that mental health stressors alone cannot fully explain them.
After the attacks, investigators said Neves Valente recorded a series of videos and audio messages in which he confessed to the shootings, expressed no remorse and voiced some of the grievances later outlined in the FBI’s assessment, but offered no clear explanation for his actions.
Investigators have said Neves Valente acted alone and that the attacks had no known connection to terrorism.
Authorities said Neves Valente briefly attended Brown as a doctoral student in the early 2000s but did not complete the program, a connection investigators say later factored into how he viewed the university.
The firearms used in the attacks were legally purchased in Florida years earlier, investigators said.
The findings come as students injured in the attack filed a lawsuit earlier this week, alleging the university ignored prior warnings about the shooter and did not provide adequate security that could have prevented the tragedy.
New York
Full federal appeals court won’t rehear $83M verdict against Trump for defamation
NEW YORK (AP) — A divided federal appeals court said Wednesday it will not grant a rare meeting of its active judges to hear an appeal of an $83 million verdict against President Donald Trump for defaming a magazine advice columnist over an encounter three decades ago.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to reject a so-called “en banc” hearing comes several months after Trump appealed to the Supreme Court another jury’s decision to grant $5 million the writer, E. Jean Carroll, after concluding that he had sexually abused her in a department store dressing room in 1996 and later defamed her. The high court has not yet decided whether to hear the case.
After a three-judge 2nd Circuit panel rejected Trump’s appeal of the $83 million verdict in September, an appeals judge asked the other Manhattan appeals jurists to hear the case.
The 2nd Circuit said Wednesday that five judges voted against a rehearing before all the judges while three judges voted in favor of the en banc.
Judge Denny Chin wrote that it was the fourth time the 2nd Circuit had denied a request for all judges to hear an appeal in the case.
He noted that Carroll first publicly asserted in 2019 in a memoir that Trump had sexually abused her in the 1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman store’s dressing room.
Trump then claimed he had never met her, called it a false accusation and said “she’s not my type” in an interview. Carroll sued him for defamation in November 2019.
Trump did not attend a May 2023 trial when a jury found that he had sexually abused Carroll and later defamed her. But he briefly testified at a second trial in January 2024 when a jury awarded Carroll $83 million for defamation.
Chin defended the appeals court’s decision to uphold the large defamation award.
“The record showed that Trump made multiple statements over many years accusing Carroll of lying for political and financial gain, and suggesting that Carroll was too unattractive for Trump to have sexually assaulted her,” he wrote.
“As a result of Trump’s statements, Carroll was harassed and humiliated, subjected to death threats, and feared for her physical safety for years. And Trump showed no remorse, continuing his attacks against Carroll during and after two federal trials, and even proclaiming two days into the Carroll I trial that he would continue to defame her ‘a thousand times,’” Chin said.
Three circuit judges — Steven J. Menashi, Michael H. Park and Debra Ann Livingston — voted for the full 2nd Circuit to hear the appeal.
In a dissent written by Menashi, they agreed that the appeals panel that heard the case should have let the United States be substituted for Trump as the defendant after the attorney general certified that he was acting in the “scope of his office or employment” when the claim arose.
And they said Trump should have been able to argue that he was protected by presidential immunity.
They also agreed that Trump should be granted a new trial and concluded that the size of the award for defamation was “grossly excessive.”
“Put together, these proceedings represent a manifest miscarriage of justice,” Menashi wrote.
FBI: Man who killed Brown students, MIT professor targeted symbolic victims tied to grievances
BOSTON (AP) — Federal investigators say they believe the man who carried out a mass shooting at Brown University and later killed a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor did not act randomly.
Instead, former Brown student Claudio Neves Valente, 48, appeared to target places and people for what they represented in his own life — institutions and individuals he associated with personal failure, missed opportunity and perceived injustice.
In a detailed behavioral assessment released Wednesday, the FBI said Neves Valente, a Portuguese national, spent years planning the attack in isolation before killing two students and wounding nine others inside an engineering building on Dec. 13. Two days later, he killed MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro at his home in Brookline, Massachusetts. Neves Valente was later found dead of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, ending a multistate search.
The FBI described a man who spent years in isolation, rarely staying in one place and lacking traditional support systems such as family, peers and authority figures who might have recognized warning signs and alerted law enforcement.
Over time, investigators said, he built a narrative of grievance and inadequacy, with “little to no opportunity for bystanders to observe and contextualize the significance of his behaviors.”
“He appeared to struggle with how he viewed his life achievements and felt he was considerably marginalized by others,” the FBI wrote in the report. “As his failures outweighed successes, his paranoia increased, compounding his continued inability to thrive and leading to him being mentally unwell and committed to dying.”
Authorities said the violence itself was “symbolic in nature.” Brown University and Loureiro, investigators wrote, represented to the shooter “his personal failures and injustices he perceived were inflicted by others over time.”
“By attacking them, Neves Valente was likely able to overcome his shame and envy by using violence to punish those communities that he perceived contributed to his downfall,” the FBI said.
Yet even as investigators laid out that framework, they acknowledged its limits, noting that only Neves Valente himself knew the full reason behind the attacks and that mental health stressors alone cannot fully explain them.
After the attacks, investigators said Neves Valente recorded a series of videos and audio messages in which he confessed to the shootings, expressed no remorse and voiced some of the grievances later outlined in the FBI’s assessment, but offered no clear explanation for his actions.
Investigators have said Neves Valente acted alone and that the attacks had no known connection to terrorism.
Authorities said Neves Valente briefly attended Brown as a doctoral student in the early 2000s but did not complete the program, a connection investigators say later factored into how he viewed the university.
The firearms used in the attacks were legally purchased in Florida years earlier, investigators said.
The findings come as students injured in the attack filed a lawsuit earlier this week, alleging the university ignored prior warnings about the shooter and did not provide adequate security that could have prevented the tragedy.
New York
Full federal appeals court won’t rehear $83M verdict against Trump for defamation
NEW YORK (AP) — A divided federal appeals court said Wednesday it will not grant a rare meeting of its active judges to hear an appeal of an $83 million verdict against President Donald Trump for defaming a magazine advice columnist over an encounter three decades ago.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to reject a so-called “en banc” hearing comes several months after Trump appealed to the Supreme Court another jury’s decision to grant $5 million the writer, E. Jean Carroll, after concluding that he had sexually abused her in a department store dressing room in 1996 and later defamed her. The high court has not yet decided whether to hear the case.
After a three-judge 2nd Circuit panel rejected Trump’s appeal of the $83 million verdict in September, an appeals judge asked the other Manhattan appeals jurists to hear the case.
The 2nd Circuit said Wednesday that five judges voted against a rehearing before all the judges while three judges voted in favor of the en banc.
Judge Denny Chin wrote that it was the fourth time the 2nd Circuit had denied a request for all judges to hear an appeal in the case.
He noted that Carroll first publicly asserted in 2019 in a memoir that Trump had sexually abused her in the 1990s in a Bergdorf Goodman store’s dressing room.
Trump then claimed he had never met her, called it a false accusation and said “she’s not my type” in an interview. Carroll sued him for defamation in November 2019.
Trump did not attend a May 2023 trial when a jury found that he had sexually abused Carroll and later defamed her. But he briefly testified at a second trial in January 2024 when a jury awarded Carroll $83 million for defamation.
Chin defended the appeals court’s decision to uphold the large defamation award.
“The record showed that Trump made multiple statements over many years accusing Carroll of lying for political and financial gain, and suggesting that Carroll was too unattractive for Trump to have sexually assaulted her,” he wrote.
“As a result of Trump’s statements, Carroll was harassed and humiliated, subjected to death threats, and feared for her physical safety for years. And Trump showed no remorse, continuing his attacks against Carroll during and after two federal trials, and even proclaiming two days into the Carroll I trial that he would continue to defame her ‘a thousand times,’” Chin said.
Three circuit judges — Steven J. Menashi, Michael H. Park and Debra Ann Livingston — voted for the full 2nd Circuit to hear the appeal.
In a dissent written by Menashi, they agreed that the appeals panel that heard the case should have let the United States be substituted for Trump as the defendant after the attorney general certified that he was acting in the “scope of his office or employment” when the claim arose.
And they said Trump should have been able to argue that he was protected by presidential immunity.
They also agreed that Trump should be granted a new trial and concluded that the size of the award for defamation was “grossly excessive.”
“Put together, these proceedings represent a manifest miscarriage of justice,” Menashi wrote.
