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.

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,

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.

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.

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.