LEILA FADEL, HOST:
To unpack what what we've learned says about the suspect, we turn again to Juliette Kayyem. She's faculty chair of the Homeland Security Project at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and she joins me now. Good morning.
JULIETTE KAYYEM: Good morning.
FADEL: OK, Juliette. We heard our reporter there call this a wild story, and I can't think of a better word. We have this former Brown student who attended over two decades ago to come back to apparently shoot up the building where he studied, and also, apparently, take out a former college class, my - this MIT professor. What do you make of all of these connections?
KAYYEM: Well, I mean, I think they are connected, as we know. And they are likely connected through Valente's sense of, you know, sort of disgust, envy. His life didn't sort of come to end up being what he wanted his life to be. We don't know that now, but if you're - just take these different pieces, decades-long connections he had to Brown - he was there decades ago - to the MIT professor who he seemed to overlap with in 1995 to 2000. Then you sort of lose Valente for a couple - for several decades. He returns back to the United States in 2017 on what's called a diversity lottery. That's just a way in which the United States gets people from countries that are generally underrepresented.
FADEL: Yeah.
KAYYEM: Has a life of no crime, no criminal record. And then, however, doesn't wake up one day and decide to, you know, sort of get mad at the people who he's mad at. He starts planning this, at least from what we can tell, as early as November when he rents a storage facility in New Hampshire and then does the killings in mid-December. So those linkages, you can create a storyline. This is what investigators are going to do now. But it is rare, I have to say, in these kinds of killings, where you have a nontriggering event. We don't think anything specific happened that would lead him back to Brown or to the MIT professor. And you have very different modes of killing, an - you know, a sort of school shooting, sort of more typical...
FADEL: Yeah.
KAYYEM: ...In this country, and then essentially an assassination. So that's what they'll be looking at.
FADEL: So you describe what law enforcement will be looking at. You mention this diversity...
KAYYEM: Yeah.
FADEL: ...Green card program. And the reaction was immediate from President Trump to suspend that program because that's how the...
KAYYEM: Yeah.
FADEL: ...Shooter came to the country. I mean, is that an effective way to mitigate future violence like what we saw at Brown?
KAYYEM: No. I mean, it isn't. It's a political way. I mean, in other words, it's the way that the White House views these kinds of cases. So the diversity visa lottery is about 55,000 immigrants a year. They come in representing these - representing countries that aren't normally represented. It's not effective for two reasons. One is, of course, you're condemning an entire class of people for the actions of one. But secondly, it doesn't get to - how can we stop these kinds of crimes? You're - I mean, I don't want to sound fatalistic here. Look, crime happens in this country. We know it. Access to guns, his ability to evade police through very sophisticated means - these are the kinds of things that we want to look at. The Brown security, the investigation, the Reddit posts - all of those things are also relevant.
But I was - I have to be honest here. I was sort of surprised how political this got very, very quickly, because this is such a unique case. The idea that you're going to draw a large lesson about immigration out of this one, you know, seems linked - a link that is very hard to sustain. But the White House will do that 'cause it's consistent with, of course, their overall policy of sort of anti-immigrants policies.
FADEL: So at this point, a timeline is becoming clear...
KAYYEM: Yeah.
FADEL: ...Hints at the grudges he may have held and what drove him. But he took his own life. So how...
KAYYEM: Yeah.
FADEL: ...Will authorities go about piecing together the why behind all this? And does that matter when senseless violence happens like this?
KAYYEM: Yeah. I mean, it matters, of course, to the families and the victims, just to have a sense of, you know - and then closure, in a way. A sort of, what happened to my child? What happened to my - to the...
FADEL: Yeah.
KAYYEM: ...Professor? So I think that is important. But, you know, we always, in these cases, look for some eureka moment. Sometimes we can find it. There was, you know, some altercation. Someone had been, you know - had given hints about what they were about to do. But sometimes we don't have answers, and I think - I mean, that's scary. It makes us feel vulnerable. Remember the Las Vegas mass shooting where the man shot from the hotel room, a couple dozen people shot and killed at the concert. We still don't have the why. There'll be an investigation to determine whether there were any hints along the way and, of course, whether there are any co-suspects, anyone that he worked with. But right now it looks like he was stewing in Florida, comes up here, sophisticated with the phone, with the car, with the driver's licenses, and then kills.
FADEL: That's former Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem, who chairs the Homeland Security Project at Harvard's Kennedy School. Thank you so much.
KAYYEM: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
