Claudio Neves Valente

nsacpi

nsacpi

Expects Yuge Games
Claudio Neves Valente, the suspect in the killing this week of an M.I.T. professor in Massachusetts, studied physics with the victim in the 1990s and graduated at the top of their class, according to the university.

A spokesman for Instituto Superior Técnico, Portugal’s premier school for science and engineering, said by phone that Mr. Neves Valente and Dr. Nuno Loureiro, the victim, studied in the same class from 1995 until 2000. Mr. Neves Valente received the higher mark, the spokesman said.

The revelation came as members of the institute’s small community of nuclear fusion scientists mourned the loss of one of their own on Friday.

While fellow scientists remembered Dr. Loureiro with warmth and admiration for his accomplishments in the field of nuclear fusion and plasma, no one seemed to recall Mr. Neves Valente or his time there as an undergraduate.


The connections the suspect in last week’s shooting rampage at Brown University had to the school were coming into sharper focus on Friday, the day after a multistate search ended when the man was found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire.

Investigators were also documenting ties between the suspect and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, who died on Tuesday after being shot the night before at his home in Brookline, Mass.

The authorities said they were still trying to understand a motive. The accused gunman, whom the authorities identified as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, had briefly been a graduate student in physics at Brown in the early 2000s. Two students died and nine more were wounded in last Saturday’s attack on the campus in Providence, R.I.

The suspect had also studied alongside Dr. Loureiro in Portugal in the 1990s, the university both men attended said on Friday. It did not immediately appear that the suspect had any direct ties to the Brown students who died, MukhammadAziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook.
 
Personal details emerged on Friday about a former Brown student from Portugal who the authorities say opened fire at the university over the weekend, killing two students, then shot a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor two days later.

The suspected gunman, whom the authorities identified as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, 48, was found dead late Thursday in a storage unit in New Hampshire, ending a frantic five-day manhunt. A former Brown classmate described the suspect as brilliant, but said he could also be a bully. Relatives in Portugal said he had been estranged from his family for more than two decades.

At least two firearms were found inside the storage unit in Salem, N.H., where Mr. Neves Valente killed himself, according to a person briefed on the investigation who was not authorized to release the information. The weapons were consistent with the firearms used in the shootings at Brown and in the M.I.T. case, the person said.

Police on Friday were still trying to make sense of Mr. Neves Valente’s crimes, they said. It’s unclear how well he knew the M.I.T. professor, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, though the two are the same age and studied in a physics program in Portugal at the same time.

The suspected gunman did not immediately appear to have direct ties to the Brown students, MukhammadAziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook, who were killed. But as a physics doctorate student in the early 2000s, Mr. Neves Valente would have spent significant time in the building where the shooting took place, according to classmates.

  • The suspect: Mr. Neves Valente had been a playful child and later a star physics student in Portugal, according to a family friend. A classmate from Brown remembered him as “kind and gentle,” but also a bully who was often unhappy and angry. Read more ›
  • Estranged family: Mr. Neves Valente’s parents had not heard anything about him in some time until Friday, when they saw his face in news reports, said Mirita Domingues, a relative of theirs. “They are devastated,” Ms. Domingues said. “His mother said this morning that she had always worried that the next time she would hear about him, he would be dead.”
 
Scott Watson, a physics professor at Syracuse University, described himself as Mr. Neves Valente’s only close friend when the two were classmates in the Brown physics graduate program. In an email on Friday, he recalled that Mr. Neves Valente was often unhappy and even angry, complaining that classes were too easy and that the food on Brown’s campus was subpar.

The two friends enjoyed meals together at a local Portuguese restaurant. Mr. Neves Valente could be “kind and gentle,” his former friend recalled — as well as brilliant. But the suspect could also be a bully, Professor Watson said, going so far as to call a Brazilian classmate his “slave.”

“I had to break up a fight once,” Professor Watson wrote.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top