Accused Brown University shooter planned attack for years, video transcripts show | Brown University shooting
The man accused of killing an MIT professor and two students at Brown University left behind video recordings in which he says he had planned the attack for years, the US Department of Justice said on Tuesday.
The shooter in the 13 and 15 December attacks was a former Brown student and Portuguese national, whom law enforcement found dead in a New Hampshire storage facility days after the shootings.
Authorities said on Tuesday that along with his body, investigators found “an electronic device” with short video recordings, which the justice department translated from Portuguese to English.
In the recordings, the shooter says that he had been planning the attack for six semesters, according to the transcript. He did not provide a motive for targeting Brown or the MIT professor, with whom he attended school in Portugal decades earlier.
The Brown University president, Christina Paxson, said the shooter was enrolled at Brown from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001. He was admitted to the graduate school to study physics beginning in September 2000. “He has no current affiliation with the university,” Paxson said.
In the recording, the shooter says he’s had the storage space for about three years. He adds he feels he has nothing to apologize for and complains in the videos about injuring his eye in the shootings. He also insists he’s not mentally ill and doesn’t want to be famous and that the video is not a manifesto.
He says his “only objective was to leave more or less” on his “own terms” and to ensure he “wouldn’t be the one who ended up suffering the most from all this”.
He calls his execution of the murders “a little incompetent” but added: “At least something was done.”
On 13 December, the shooter came onto the Brown campus, killed two students and wounded nine others in a classroom in the school’s engineering building. Days later, he went to the MIT professor’s home in Brookline, Massachusetts, and shot him.
Law enforcement, including the FBI, searched for the shooter for five days before authorities found him dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, which is about 40 (65km) miles north of Brookline and more than 80 miles north of Brown University.
The two students killed were identified by family as Ella Cook, a sophomore from Alabama, and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, an Uzbek national in his first year at Brown. The MIT professor was a 47-year-old physicist and fusion scientist named Nuno FG Loureiro.
