Phoebe Tonks
A mass shooting which rocked Brown University and left two students dead could potentially be linked to the assassination of a college professor at MIT, police have said.
The shooter at Brown, in Rhode Island, began firing at an engineering building at around 4pm local time on Saturday, December 13, where students at the college had been taking a final exam review in economics.
Two students were tragically killed in the attack, and nine others were injured, with the suspect having since been found dead with what appears to be an inflicted gunshot wound.
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Yet while detectives have been on the hunt for answers to the chilling case, a further murder took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) just two days later.
Nuno F Gomes Loureiro, 47, a nuclear science and engineering professor from Portugal, was shot "multiple times" on Monday and died on Tuesday morning in hospital.
Initially there were no clues about a motive or the person behind the killing, but police are now investigating whether the two attacks could be linked.
Loureiro was gunned down inside his home in Brookline, near Boston, around 8.30pm on Monday evening – around 50 miles from the Brown campus.
According to authorities, the suspected Brown shooter rented a vehicle that was later found near Loureiro’s home. The car was also crucially the same make and model as the vehicle identified in connection with the MIT professor's death.
FBI agent Ted Docks initially said earlier this week that 'there seems to be no connection' between the two incidents, but new information has since come to light that could potentially link the crimes.
According to NBC10, investigators made the potential link after tracing an overdue rental car believed to be connected to both shootings – something that was soon branded a 'new break in the case'.