Tragedy at Brown: Gunman’s Rampage Sparks Outrage Over Campus Safety

On December 13, 2025, a masked gunman opened fire inside Room 166 of Brown University’s Barus & Holley engineering building, killing two students and wounding nine others during a final exam review session. The two students who lost their lives were identified as Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, and the campus — and the nation — was once again left asking why our institutions are so vulnerable.

 Authorities have since identified the person of interest as 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente,

 

and his body was discovered in a Salem, New Hampshire storage unit days after the attack; an autopsy later showed he died by suicide. The grim timeline — shooting on December 13, the killing of an MIT professor two days later, and a body recovered shortly afterward — leaves more questions than answers about motive and warning signs.

Investigators say Valente is also suspected in the December 15 slaying of MIT physics professor Nuno Loureiro, and law enforcement tied ballistic evidence and surveillance to a single person of interest. That linkage transforms what might have been dismissed as isolated campus violence into a chilling, multi-jurisdictional attack with clear academic connections.

The manhunt that followed was exhaustive: police and federal agents tracked a rental car whose plates had been swapped and pieced together movements across several states as they pursued leads. This was not a random, untraceable act — resources and visibility were available, yet the carnage still happened, which should make every parent and taxpayer furious.

In the wake of the killings, federal officials moved to pause the Diversity Immigrant Visa program, pointing to how the suspect entered and later obtained residency in the United States, a development that has rightly reignited debates about our immigration and vetting systems. Americans deserve transparent answers about how someone with such a background slipped through the cracks and what policy changes will keep our campuses safe.

Make no mistake: this tragedy is a failure of multiple systems — campus security, institutional priorities, and policy choices that treat security as optional and ideology as inviolable. Ivy League administrators who preach virtue-signaling and open-door diversity cannot hide from responsibility when their policies and priorities leave students exposed and campuses underprotected.

Conservatives must use grief as a call to action, not as an excuse for platitudes. We should demand stronger security measures on college campuses, better mental health and reporting systems that actually work, and immigration policies that protect American communities — not ones that leave us guessing which program allowed a dangerous individual into our midst.

We mourn Ella Cook, Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, and all the victims, and we stand with the students and families who now carry scars no policy paper can erase. For hardworking Americans who send their kids to school trusting institutions to protect them, this is a wake-up call: insist on accountability, practical reforms, and leaders who prioritize safety over fashionably permissive policies.

If the political class refuses to act, it will be the ordinary citizens and conservative lawmakers who must push for real change — tougher vetting, secure campuses, and an honest conversation about the cultural rot that treats security as secondary. We owe it to the victims to stop treating these horrors as abstract tragedies and start treating them as preventable failures that demand immediate reform.