Brown University hires former US Attorney Zachary Cunha as possible campus shooting lawsuits loom

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First on Fox: Brown University has retained former U.S. Attorney Zachary Cunha, who stepped down in May, in preparation for possible lawsuits related to the fatal shooting of two students on campus earlier this month, Fox News has learned.

The Ivy League school said it has hired Cunha, who served as the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island, to help coordinate with authorities.

“Brown works routinely with outside counsel whose expertise complements that of the University’s Office of the General Counsel,” the university said in a statement. In this case, we retained Zachary Cunha, the former United States Attorney for the District of Rhode Island, to assist the University in coordinating with federal, state and local law enforcement agencies.”

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Brown has come under criticism over the Dec. 13 shooting, which took the lives of Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov inside a campus academic building.

The suspected gunman, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national who studied at Brown from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001 to study physics, was found dead last week.

The university came under heavy criticism over the lack of security cameras on campus as investigators spent days canvassing the neighborhood outside the campus for surveillance video, amid a manhunt.

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makeshift memorial for the victims at Van Wickle Gate at Brown University

A motive for the killings remains unclear.

Cunha was nominated to serve as the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island in 2021 by former President Joe Biden. He resigned in February after receiving notification from the White House that President Donald Trump had directed him to do so, the Justice Department said at the time.

Cunha is a partner at Nixon Peabody, a law firm with offices across the globe, where he serves in the firm’s litigation department and government investigations and white-collar defense practice group, according to its website.

As federal prosecutors, Cunha’s office worked cases related to the opioid pandemic, fraud and other crimes, the Justice Department said.