Miami-Dade deputies were asked to help find Brown University shooting suspect
The Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office was asked to help find the man investigators say fatally shot two Brown University students last week and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor days later, the agency said.
Deputies went to a location that was provided to them earlier this week, but “the search did not yield any results,” the sheriff’s office said in a statement provided to the Miami Herald Friday. The office was contacted by the FBI about suspected gunman, Claudio Neves-Valente.
The sheriff’s office declined to say if the location was the same address as the one Providence, Rhode Island police say was linked to Neves-Valente.
“Detectives responded accordingly and were later advised that their assistance was no longer needed,” the statement said.
The federal Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms in Miami confirmed Friday afternoon that they were contacted and are helping investigators with probing Neves-Valente’s South Florida connections.
Neves-Valente, 48, was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot Thursday night inside a storage unit in New Hampshire. Police and federal agents tracked him down to that location following the murders inside the Brown lecture hall on Dec. 13 and MIT professor Nuno Loureiro’s murder two days later in Brookline, Massachusetts.
READ MORE: Brown University shooting suspect lived in Miami, authorities say
Although Neves-Valente is from Portugal, authorities said during a news briefing Thursday night that his last known address was a home in the 1300 block of Northeast 200th Street in Miami-Dade County.
Miami-Dade property records show the current owner of the home isn’t Neves-Valente. The three-bedroom, two-bathroom house, valued at $423,439, sits in a residential neighborhood west of Aventura in the northernmost part of Miami-Dade.
A man who occupies the home Neves-Valentes lived at said “no comment” when reached Friday via his Ring doorbell.
Authorities have talked to the current residents of the home and discussed if they had possible connections to Neves-Valente. They didn’t elaborate.
Several of the neighbors said they never saw Neves-Valente in the neighborhood and did not know of him before the shootings.
Hunt for suspect
On Tuesday, Providence police were alerted to a Reddit post offering tips about the shooter’s whereabouts that read, “The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental.”
“That was the car [Neves-Valente] was driving,” according to an arrest affidavit from Providence, Rhode Island police.
The Reddit poster also told authorities they saw Neves-Valente in public. A man named Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente rented a Nissan Sentra on Dec. 1 at Alamo Rental Cars in Boston using a Florida driver’s license, authorities said.
Police swarmed Salem, New Hampshire, Thursday after finding the abandoned car with the Florida plates believed to be connected to him. That’s where they found the body in the storage facility.
Neves-Valente is accused of bursting into the Brown auditorium last Saturday and opening fire, killing 19-year-old Ella Cook and 18-year-old MukhammedAziz Umurzokov. Investigators found 44 spent 9 mm shell casings in the classroom and hallway, according to the Providence affidavit.
Investigators say he then drove to Brookline and shot Loureiro to death.
Loureiro also is a native of Portugal and he and Neves-Valente studied together in Lisbon, police said.
Neves-Valente attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001 as a doctoral student studying physics. He officially withdrew in the fall of 2003. Authorities said Neves-Valente left the United States, but did not disclose when. He returned in September 2017 at JFK airport in New York. He was issued a diversity immigrant visa a few months prior, and attained permanent legal residency.
READ MORE: After Brown U. shooting, Trump’s green-card lottery pause puts Miami in spotlight
After Neves-Valente was identified as the shooting suspect, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Friday that the Trump administration is pausing an immigrant green-card lottery program that granted Neves-Valente legal permission to enter the United States years ago.
Congress created the green-card diversity program, known as DV1, in 1990 to attract people from countries that have low rates of immigration to the United States. In fiscal year 2026, 55,000 immigrants will be allowed to enter into a lottery to come to the United States and receive green cards as long as they are not from countries that had more than 50,000 nationals come to the country in the last five years.
This story was originally published December 19, 2025 at 11:45 AM.
