PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — Just before Thanksgiving, Claudio Neves Valente checked into a Boston hotel and traveled to Brown University, where he had studied physics 25 years earlier.
The drive to Providence was short, and in the days that followed, the 48-year-old Portuguese national returned to the campus again and again. On most trips, he drifted around Brown and the surrounding neighborhoods in a gray Nissan rental car with Florida plates. A custodian noticed him inside an engineering building while most students were home on the holiday break and spotted him again three days later, according to authorities.
Investigators say that on Dec. 13, Neves Valente returned to Brown once more, this time with a 9 mm handgun, and he opened fire in a lecture hall in an attack that killed two students and injured nine others. He got away in the ensuing chaos, and two days later, showed up at the home of a Massachusetts professor who was a classmate of his in Portugal in the 1990s, and fatally shot him, too, investigators said…