The suspect in last month’s mass shooting at Brown University and the subsequent killing of an MIT professor admitted to the attacks in a series of short videos recovered from an electronic device, the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Massachusetts said Tuesday, according to CNN.
The office released transcripts of four videos recorded after the deadly December shootings by suspect Claudio Neves Valente, translated from Portuguese to English. Valente did not provide a motive or express any apology in the recordings. The US Attorney’s Office said the federal investigation into his motives will continue.
Two students - Ella Cook and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov - were killed in the attack at Brown University. Nuno F.G. Loureiro, an MIT professor, was fatally shot at his home near Boston.
In one video, Valente said he did not care about being famous or leaving a legacy after the shooting, and that “even though I would have a lot to say and write," he lacked the patience to produce a manifesto.
Valente said he had been planning the attack for more than six semesters and had “plenty of opportunities" to carry it out earlier, but “always chickened out."
Across more than 11 minutes of recorded statements, Valente voiced vague grievances about unnamed individuals, commented on how he was portrayed in the media after the shooting, and described what he saw inside the Brown auditorium he attacked. He said he had no regret for the attacks, except that he suffered a serious eye injury after being struck by a shell round.
Valente also said he “never" intended to conduct the shooting in an auditorium. “I wanted to do it in a regular room," he said. “So, it all went wrong."
He said that when he entered the auditorium, he saw only one man and believed the others had escaped through the emergency exit once the shooting began. Valente said he did not realize multiple students were hiding in the room when he assumed it was empty and left. He added that those who hid “were kind of stupid" for not using the emergency exit.