The Brown killer and the Brookline killer were the same Portuguese ex-student in physics, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente
And now he’s dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Salem, NH.
Oh, and it was a homeless ex-student in physics, who lives in the classroom building in which the Brown murders took place, who broke the case – posting on Reddit, among other things – and gets the money reward, which at $50K doesn’t seem like nearly enough. Perhaps he should receive a portion of the hefty salary of the president of Brown, whom just about everyone agrees is a nincompoop at best.
Truth really is stranger than fiction. If you wrote a script, would you choose that description of the case and the killer? You can find details of the story here as well as here. From the latter:
[The Brown homeless man] John, it’s been revealed, was the second person of interest whose image was put out earlier this week, and he was onto the suspect way before anyone else. According to a Fox News report, John became suspicious of Neves-Valente after the two “locked eyes” in a campus bathroom hours before the shooting. John then followed the gunman around the campus and eventually confronted him about his weird behavior.
Dead men tell no tales, and unless Claudio Manuel Neves Valente left one of those manifestos so popular with mass murderers, the motive may remain very obscure. It’s somewhat comforting to know it was one killer rather than two, but it’s terrible to think that the second murder might have been avoided if he could he have been caught earlier.
Most people are faulting the lack of good security camera video at Brown and the failure to establish a perimeter in a timely fashion, and the school also has a university chief of security Rodney Chatman, who may be a DEI hire and had left his previous position under a cloud:
According to the Salt Lake Tribune, Chatman said he faced pushback for policing reforms he tried to implement at the school. He departed for Brown in 2021.
In October, two local police unions, the Brown University Security Patrolperson’s Association and the University Police Sergeants Union, issued votes of “no confidence” in Chatman, the former expressing “deep concern among the membership regarding the direction and leadership of the Department of Public Safety,” according to the Brown Daily Herald. …
The school has faced criticism regarding the killer’s access to the building and a lack of security cameras that could have helped in identifying the shooter.
Chatman has only briefly addressed the shooting in the days since it occurred, saying that three outdoor sirens on the campus did not activate during the shooting because of how quickly the event took place, according to the Rhode Island Current.
Fox News Digital has found that diversity, equity and inclusion has been a major focus for Brown’s campus safety department and Chatman himself. …
In a prior post on LinkedIn, Chatman asked other campus police departments to refrain from posting pictures of themselves with weapons or performing tactical maneuvers, suggesting that it could make their communities anxious.
Perhaps worst of all, we have this allegation:
Stefanik shared a report that Brown University was pressured by “human rights groups” demanding that they disable their CCTVs so violent pro-Palestinian activists wouldn’t be held accountable for their actions.
I really, really hope that’s not what happened. But I fear it is.
Oh, and it was a homeless ex-student in physics, who lives in the classroom building in which the Brown murders took place, who broke the case – posting on Reddit, among other things – and gets the money reward, which at $50K doesn’t seem like nearly enough.
I took many classes in that same building, very long ago. And as a physics grad student at a different university, we had a brilliant student in our class, who was also homeless and sleeping in his T/A office.
Yeah… only $50K!?
Neo.
As regards the cameras being taken out of action…what could be more likely, given the atmosphere? Which is given. And likely imposed by Brown, officially.
I’m seeing many comments on various websites who are treating “John” as if he was a drug taking loser like they see in LA or under their local highway bridges. They are wondering why he was on Reddit and had a cell phone.
Not many people seem to consider that he is a graduate of Brown so he probably had a laptop, cell phone and other basics. He may not have a job since he is a young, white (?) male who can’t get a job interview because of DEI – see #7 in yesterday’s Round Up post.
A million bucks ain’t what it used to be, but $50k is still a nice chunk of change. Hopefully he can now get his own place to stay, among other things. Kudos to “John” for doing his civic duty!
Link to charging affidavit:
https://riag.ri.gov/media/8016/download
Re: Security cameras & Mustapha Kharbouch
Absent contrary proof from Brown, I think we’ve got to assume their cameras were intentionally disabled. It’s not just that there was no footage at the site of the shootings (why not?), there wasn’t any camera footage of the perp anywhere from Brown.
All the footage we saw was from local neighborhood security systems.
Furthermore, Brown officials and law enforcement were so evasive, as well as dumb-sounding, I consider it likely they were hiding something like the cameras being turned off, perhaps many things.
Likewise the whole Mustapha Kharbouch business. I wouldn’t be surprised if Brown half-suspected he was guilty and they were running interference by scrubbing his web pages.
Given recent violence, it’s not unreasonable to consider a queer Palestinian activist a good candidate for shooting up a Brown classroom — particularly one including a Republican student leader.
I think John ought to set up a GoFundMe page.
I won’t argue with the evidence, which seems solid. I’m still having trouble understanding what would set this guy off to punish Brown and his former student acquaintance from Portugal after all these years. Envy and suppressed anger over his own lesser accomplishments could bubble over, but after twenty-four years? What was he doing from 2001 until last week? Had he been in touch with someone or something that brought all his imagined grievances flooding back?
DEI non-security measures cost two innocent students their lives.
I’m still having trouble understanding what would set this guy off to punish Brown and his former student acquaintance from Portugal after all these years.
Kate:
Good question. I don’t know.
Maybe it was his own longstanding grievances combined with the current climate.
I was once roommates with an MIT grad who was rather bitter he hadn’t gone far at all with his degree. Thirty years later he was still renting a modest apartment in Porter Square, Cambridge.
It seems to have turned out that nothing that was said about Brown in the first few days was true; at least it doesn’t seem compatible with what’s being said now.
I wonder if we’re going to learn more things that are incompatible with what’s been said so far, or if this will just fade away like Stephen Paddock’s shooting in Las Vegas.
Is it really that surprising that a homeless drifter is more astute than the typical high-level university administrator?
I plan to offer my guesses about motives tomorrow.
Speculation, the Brown murders and mayhem were a planned diversion from his main target in Brookline. Too clever by half but truly evil
I hazard the guess that a lot of the college grad/advanced degree folks blame Trump as compensation for the success they have failed to achieve or fear they won’t.
It’s a real problem for the millions of people who paid their dues for a college degree and haven’t been rewarded as they thought they were promised.
According to Victor Davis Hanson these are the people who elected Mamdani.
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but after twenty-four years
You would be surprised. Some folks go over the edge and go round and round in circles for the rest of their lives. I knew a student like that, he was quite normal, and then he wasn’t. His family eventually kicked him out and he was homeless thereafter. His obsession was some accident in Southern Utah that he was seeking compensation for. I gave him food money now and then, and eventually he gave me his files to keep. I haven’t seen him in years and suspect he has died. Medication might have helped him, but how to get him there?
Cameras don’t keep people out. And they don’t light up as John did in a manner of speaking when a suspicious person enters their field. But it would have been useful to know who you’re looking for after the murder.
I saw or heard one report that “John” went to the police within an hour of the initial alerts that they wanted to question him. Possibly motivated by his civic duty plus the prospect of a reward? But the media kept showing his image with claims he was still being sought.
I presume that was a ruse by the police to keep the potentially identified perpetrator off his guard.
An unemployed physics student/graduate, even one with only a BS, as a STEM educated person would seem to have been in some market demand*. Possibly the DEI aspects held him back, but having the knowledge, or the credential, and the ability to sell yourself are three different aspects to the situation.
*My engineering undergraduate advisor in the 60’s suggested that while engineers might graduate with a BS and be more employable than a physics major with only a BS, that actually the people that could handle the physics program were more likely to be able to develop or derive their technical understanding from “first principles” and thus were more intelligent in that aspect of things than the engineers. The latter would typically learn the derivations but not be able to recreate them from scratch.
“the people that could handle the physics program were more likely to be able to develop or derive their technical understanding from “first principles” and thus were more intelligent in that aspect of things than the engineers.”
It depends on what your’e doing. Sometimes there is no substitute for theoretical knowledge. But a bent towards practical implementations is vital to create something that actually works. I saw it from both ends in my long engineering career.
Today I was listening to a YouTube of Richard Feynman quotes.
He mentioned that some people thought he was slow in college because he was busy, not memorizing, but working to understand deep down what was happening with a topic or an equation, not how to memorize it for a test.
I’d say that applies to physicists and engineers. I noticed it in programming.
Some of these criticisms are, to me, quite off the mark. FWIW, I’ve worked for almost a decade as both a security and police officer on a (very) large university.
First of all, the people who are wondering how the shooter got in the building: universities, in my experience, aren’t secured like K-12 schools. When classes are in session, doors are unlocked and buildings are generally open to the public. While that might not normally be the case on a Saturday, with finals going on, the buildings that were holding exams would be open.
Second, regarding the alert sirens, from the timelines I’ve seen, they would have been pointless. From what I’ve seen reported, the first call to 911 came in at 4:05 pm. Camera footage time stamped 4:06 pm showed the suspected shooter roughly a block away from the building where the shooting took place. I assume that the 911 call center belongs to the city of Providence, not Brown, so by the time that the 911 operator could have alerted campus authorities, the shooting was over and the shooter was leaving the area. No point in lighting off the sirens. It would have been closing the barn door after the horse had already escaped.
That said, this shooter was pretty unusual in that he doesn’t really seem to have been interested in racking up as big of a body count as he could, and unlike the vast majority of mass shooters, he didn’t stick around the area. Had he done so, the sirens and alert system (if it’s like the one at my university, it uses texts and emails to send alerts) might have helped.
One thing I haven’t seen is how long it took the first police officers, whether Brown’s campus cops or Providence PD, to get to the scene of the shooting.
“Self inflicted”…riiiiight, how convenient
I cannot imagine what his motive might have been for shooting up an economics review session.
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On physics vs. engineering degrees: My husband’s BA is in physics. He found he was extremely well-prepared for his MSEE program, much more so than fellow students with engineering undergrads.
It may be that the shooter could have found a good job, but I’m guessing that what bothered him was his failure to excel at theoretical physics, hence a hatred for his long-ago fellow student who did.
*My engineering undergraduate advisor in the 60’s suggested that while engineers might graduate with a BS and be more employable than a physics major with only a BS, that actually the people that could handle the physics program were more likely to be able to develop or derive their technical understanding from “first principles” and thus were more intelligent in that aspect of things than the engineers. The latter would typically learn the derivations but not be able to recreate them from scratch.”
From my perspective teaching physics undergrads for over 40 years: an undergrad degree in physics is not particularly useful. One may get into STEM equipment sales or some partially related field. It is useful for advanced training. A vast majority of my students went on to post grad work in other areas; about 10% went to physics/astro grad studies. The rest went mainly into engineering and MBA programs, a few into medicine. I know from direct conversations with admission people in those areas that they highly valued physics majors over their own typical applicants. Med schools would fast track any physics applicant,and same for engineering schools. Business schools especially liked physics BS grads as they knew they could do advanced mathematical modeling that was beyond most typical MBA applicants. And if they had worked in my lab and actually published research, it was icing on the cake. Not that they would ever do such research in their grad studies (high energy ion-molecule collisions), but it showed that they could take a problem and run with it independently and produce results.
The rhode island officials did a bang up job on this one!
Business schools especially liked physics BS grads as they knew they could do advanced mathematical modeling that was beyond most typical MBA applicants.
As an engineering major, I took a course that one week had us playing a land use game w business majors. By the end of the hour, the business majors thought I was an accounting major, due to my number skills.
The physics-engineering continuity reminds me of a family friend. He was a physics major with a lot of hands-on experience. He had a side job repairing TVs—and built a TV for us out of spare parts. He was also a ham radio operator. I suspect he built his ham radio. He was hired as an engineer, got a MSEE, and ended up in educational administration.
the story raises more questions then answers, if the shooter had indeed cased the building, he would have quickly known, his life long nemesis wasn’t there (i’m being overdramatic) the physics building has taken on other tenants, like economics professors, why did he target ella and the uzbek student, why did he first not travel to brookline, if this was his target, where is the motive,
where did he get the money, for the expensive house he was living in miami (again that info is curious, some suggest he was living in downscale miami gardens, not beach front
property) now there wasn’t a particular reason for authorities to be looking for him, before this,
now if he was a catspaw for other interests, like those mentioned in other threads,
i’m reminded the portuguese writer dos santos, has a physicist protagonist with the same name as the atty general, noronha, who did not perform his duties very well,
one of these works, divine fury, was about islamism in his native, portugal and egypt where the antagonist comes from, a more honest account of the subject than most, although dos santos is clearly agnostic on all faiths,
I would like to know more about the shooter’s history from leaving Brown in 2001 to his return last week as a killer; and more about what he’d been doing recently and with whom he was conversing and what he was looking at online.
that would be one way for the story to make sense, if he lived on miami beach for instance, he might have blended in, more because of the sizable brazilian population, (then again this was back when I was in real estate, some time ago,)
but it seems the level of curiosity about this matter seems limited about the questions I referenced, particular, not to mention extraneous concerns like the diversity visa program, that doesn’t have a good track record, the egyptian in 2002, the kazakh in 2017 and now this instance,
it is said fiction is supposed to make sense, internally but reality not so much, the currents of islamism and deconstructive nihilism that brown seems to be saturated in, led to this circumstance,
Given the relative closeness of the two murder sites, one might ask why bother? Had he killed the professor and then headed for the hills, his potential for getting away with it would seem much greater.
But he chose to start something for no reason…? That would have people looking for…somebody…? That would have a non-zero chance of identifying him eventually…? That might even get him stopped before killing the professor…?
Extremely poor planning, if the basic plan was to kill the prof. Why bother with the Brown thing? There was little possibility of the Brown murders requiring flooding the zone with law enforcement thus leaving Brookline untended. No advantage there.
So either extremely irrational or two solid goals.
Looking for the rational in the irrational is a losing proposition. But looking for what might have caused the irrational plan is…interesting. Given his background educationally and personally.
As a carefully-considered pejorative, I think you nailed it with’nincompoop’. There seem to be many with this qualification in the academic world.