Investigators believe there may be a connection between shock killings at two of the country’s most renowned universities, sources say.
The murder of an acclaimed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor may be tied to the mass shooting that left two students dead at Brown, officials close to the investigation tell the Boston Globe and WPRI.
Authorities are currently probing a “potential connection,” the Globe reports. The FBI previously said that no evidence suggested a tie between the grisly slayings.
One potential link that authorities are probing is whether the same rental car was seen near the sites of both shootings at the time they occurred, three senior officials familiar with the investigation told NBC News.
The Daily Beast reached out to the Brookline and Providence Police Departments for comment. The FBI declined to comment.
Sources told CNN on Thursday afternoon that “investigators believe they have identified” the suspect in the Brown shooting. The station Boston 25 reported shortly after that there is an arrest warrant for the Brown University shooting suspect.
An official announcement was not immediately made.
In both cases, the gunman who perpetrated each attack—or both, potentially—has evaded arrest for days, unsettling those with ties to each university, which are just 52 miles apart from each other by car.
The first shooting occurred Saturday afternoon during final exams on Brown’s campus in Providence, Rhode Island.
A gunman opened fire at unarmed students in an engineering building, killing Ella Cook, of Alabama, and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, of Uzbekistan. Nine others were struck by the gunfire but survived.
Two days later, a gunman entered the home of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro in Brookline, Massachusetts, and shot him multiple times. Loureiro, a 47-year-old physics professor from Portugal, was rushed to the hospital but died from his injuries on Tuesday.
Footage of the Brown gunman has been spread far and wide by authorities, but their identity has remained elusive. A motive also remains a mystery.
Still, some right-wing commentators have theorized that the Brown attack was politically motivated. That’s partly because Cook, 19, was vice president of the Ivy League university’s Republican club.
“Ella Cook was just 19 years old—a Conservative, a Christian, and Vice President of the Republican Club at Brown University,” wrote the conservative influencer Benny Johnson. “She was brutally killed by a shooter in what appears to be a targeted political attack.”
He continued, “If you still don’t see what’s happening, you haven’t been paying attention.”
Authorities have said nothing of a potential motive. Until a suspect is apprehended, or at least identified, that is likely to remain the case.
