Are elite US universities prepared for targeted shootings?

Two deadly shootings at elite American universities within 50 miles of each other earlier this week have been linked to a single suspect with loose ties to both targets, according to authorities.

Had he been stopped after killing two Brown University students and injuring nine more, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor prosecutors say he killed two days later would still be alive.

Critics have blasted Brown over an apparent lack of surveillance video from the Barus and Holley building, where the mass shooting claimed the lives of Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov. The gunman skipped town before police identified him, walking right by campus cops in the minutes after the shooting, home security video taken from the other end of the block reveals.

But many major universities have similar security flaws, experts tell Fox News Digital.

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“By and large, American universities are completely open,” said David Katz, a former DEA agent and the CEO of Global Security Group, a private safety firm founded in the aftermath of 9/11. “Pick a campus you can’t just walk randomly into, an academic building you can’t just enter and the classroom you can’t access.”

Katz, who teaches active-shooter response classes around the country, said he found it disconcerting when he dropped his own son off for college and was told the university police department at his new school did not mandate similar training for its campus cops. 

After evading capture outside the Brown massacre on Saturday, Neves-Valente drove 50 miles away to Brookline, Massachusetts, and gunned down renowned nuclear physicist Nuno Loureiro in his apartment Monday evening, according to authorities.

The motive remains unclear, but Neves-Valente briefly attended Brown back in 2000 and 2001 and, before that, also studied at the same Portuguese university where Loureiro earned his undergraduate degree.

Brown President Christina Paxson told reporters Thursday that Neves-Valente likely took physics classes at Barus and Holley during his time as a student.

“While Brown remains committed to searching all institutional systems to identify any pertinent information to assist law enforcement, we have thus far found no indication of any concerns pertaining to conduct or any public safety interactions during the short time Neves Valente was enrolled as a graduate student at Brown,” she wrote later in an open letter. “As of yet, we have not identified any employee who recalls Neves Valente, nor is there any Brown record of recent contact between this individual and Brown.”

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The slayings mark the latest campus violence in a year that’s seen plenty. Here are just a few:

• In April, 20-year-old Phoenix Ikner allegedly killed two and injured six at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
• The same month, police said a 24-year-old gunman killed one and wounded six at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina.
• In September, 20-year-old Tyler Robinson allegedly drove hours from his home in southern Utah before fatally shooting Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk in the neck during a campus speech at Utah Valley University in Orem.
• More violence broke out in December, with two students shot at Kentucky State University in Frankfort. One of them died. Days later, Neves-Valente began his New England murder spree.

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“There have been a number of shootings on college campuses that should alert every chief of police and certainly every university president, that they should be looking at this issue very seriously,” said Greg Rogers, a former FBI agent who teaches criminal justice at UVU, where Kirk was killed. “That being said, I don’t wanna sound naïve about it. Unfortunately, college campuses need to be open spaces like that.”

Additional cameras, however, may have helped stop Neves-Valente before he killed Loureiro — but they wouldn’t have saved the Brown students, he said.

“We live in a world where, I’ve learned this in my undercover career…that’s not something you can stop with extra cops on campus or some more video cameras,” he told Fox News Digital. 

This has unfolded in a year that saw widespread anti-Israel campus demonstrations that prompted clashes between police and pro-Palestinian agitators as well as congressional hearings.

Police in riot gear even stormed a building at another Ivy League university earlier this year after agitators broke into and barricaded themselves inside Hamilton Hall at Columbia University in New York City.

Outside of school, Ivy League alumnus Luigi Mangione is accused of assassinating UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to send a message about the U.S. health insurance industry.

Experts have questioned Brown’s actions in the wake of the shooting, confusing press conferences, and the fact that no cameras inside Barus and Holley are believed to have recorded Neves-Valente, based on what authorities said at press briefings.

“We know how schools hide a lot of stuff but something’s brewing here,” said Joseph Giacalone, a retired NYPD sergeant and an adjunct professor of criminal justice at Penn State-Lehigh Valley. “Why did they scrub the website of that one guy? You’re just adding to the conspiracy theories.”

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At points in the investigation, web sleuths wrongly asserted that a current Brown student may have been the suspect. Investigators rejected the notion, but multiple “spotlight” articles on the university website were scrubbed from public view without explanation, prompting additional criticism.

Police later found the real killer dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He attended Brown, briefly, more than two decades ago.

“It needs to be a national discussion by all of the colleges and their campuses on how they handle security,” Giacalone told Fox News Digital. “Colleges like to handle things with kid gloves because they are institutions of higher learning, but at what cost?”

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Fox News’ Jasmine Baehr and Peter D’Abrosca contributed to this report.