Authorities have identified a person of interest in connection with the shooting rampage at Brown University last weekend and the murder of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor in his Boston-area home, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Investigators identified a car the Brown suspect is believed to have rented and failed to return to the rental company, the person said, asking not to be identified because the information hasn’t yet been made public. The same car was also identified in connection with the Monday shooting in Brookline of Nuno Loureiro, who led MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, the person said.
Police in Boston have put out an alert for the vehicle and the person driving it, warning that he may be armed and dangerous, the person said.
It’s a key development in a pair of shooting cases that had thus far confounded investigators while shocking residents of what are typically very safe communities. The potential breakthrough followed an almost weeklong manhunt by city, state and federal officials after the deadly shooting at Brown on December 13th, which killed two people and injured nine others.
While police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation released videos and photographs of the suspected shooter walking near Brown’s campus in the hours before the attack, the individual’s face was obscured by a mask.
Ted Docks, the special agent in charge for the FBI’s Boston office, had said on Tuesday that “at this time, there seems to be no connection” between the Brown and MIT shootings but that the Massachusetts state police had pledged to share evidence as the investigation unfolds.
The Norfolk District Attorney’s Office said officers responding to a report of a shooting on Gibbs Street in Brookline on Monday found Loureiro with gunshot wounds. The 47-year-old academic was taken to a nearby hospital and died early Tuesday.
Loureiro also taught in the departments of Nuclear Science and Engineering and Physics at MIT. His research focused on the behaviour of magnetised plasmas, including turbulence, magnetic reconnection and confinement, work that is central to advances in fusion energy, according to the university.
Following the shooting at Brown, students and residents of Providence, Rhode Island, have grown increasingly frustrated as days passed with few apparent advances in the investigation. Authorities detained a person of interest at a Rhode Island hotel shortly after the shooting but quickly released him for want of evidence, shattering a short-lived sense of relief on Brown’s campus and the surrounding city.
Brown has more than 1,200 cameras on its campus, but there’s few if any in the part of the Barus & Holley engineering building where the shooting took place, according to Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha. There’s no clear footage of the suspected shooter inside the building, he said.
The Ivy League university stepped up security following the shooting, doubling public-safety staffing and welcoming in other law enforcement. Brown also plans to conduct a “large-scale systematic security review of the entire campus”, a spokesperson said.
The shooter attacked students in an exam-prep session for an economics class. Sophomore Ella Cook and freshman Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov were killed in the shooting. – Bloomberg
