Gunman in Brown University Shooting Confessed in Videos, Planned Attack for Years

Claudio Neves Valente, suspect in the Brown University shooting in Providence.Providence Police DepartmentThe gunman responsible for last month's deadly shooting at Brown University and the killing of an MIT professor two days later confessed to both attacks in a series of videos discovered by authorities, according to documents released Tuesday.

Transcripts from the videos, made public by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts, reveal that 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente had planned the Brown attack for at least six semesters before carrying it out.

Authorities found the videos at a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, where Neves Valente was discovered dead by suicide several days after the shootings. The exact recording date remains unclear.

The Justice Department translated the transcripts from Portuguese, Neves Valente's native language. Prosecutors said the videos did not reveal a clear motive for the killings.

"I had plenty of opportunities, especially this semester...but I always chickened out," Neves Valente said in one video, referring to the Brown shooting.

In the same recording, he added that his "only objective was to leave more or less on my own terms," describing the attack as "already long overdue."

"To say that I was extraordinarily satisfied, no, but I also don't regret what I did," he said.

Another transcript suggests the attack did not unfold as Neves Valente had envisioned. He said "it all went wrong" because he wanted to conduct the shooting in a "regular room," not "an auditorium."

The former Brown graduate student described entering the classroom and seeing only "one guy down there," assuming others had fled through an emergency exit. He was apparently unaware that several students were hiding in the room, which he believed was empty when he left.

Neves Valente also referenced an encounter with a possible witness who recorded his license plate number, expressing surprise that authorities took so long to locate him.

On December 13, Neves Valente opened fire during a study session in a Brown University classroom, killing two students and injuring nine others. Two days later, authorities say he shot and killed MIT professor Nuno Loureiro in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Officials said Neves Valente and Loureiro both attended the same university in Portugal, where they studied physics. The two are believed to have known each other.

The investigation into the motives behind both shootings remains ongoing.