My guess at the Brown/Brookline killer’s motive
From a professor in Portugal who had taught Neves Valente, the man who killed the two students at Brown and the MIT physics professor in Brookline:
Professor Bruno Gonçalves remembers teaching Claudio Neves Valente at the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal, where the suspect studied physics in the late 1990s along with Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor who was killed.
Gonçalves, who is now the president of the department, told CBS News that Neves Valente was the best student in his course.
Gonçalves also said he knew Louriero, but only from meeting him in later years after he left university, and he has no memory of him as a student. Louriero went on to a successful career in physics research and was director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.
Neves Valente enrolled in a PhD program in physics at Brown in 2000 but only stayed one year, the university said. Gonçalves said he has searched for other academic or professional traces of his former student after his time at Brown but couldn’t find any.
So that leads to an obvious possible motive: envy of others who have succeeded or who are about to succeed, and rage because of his own failed career despite his brilliance. Perhaps he even thought the class he shot up at Brown was a physics class; I’ve read that it’s where the physics classes used to be held.
In a statement, the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal confirmed that Neves Valente had been a student at its Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion, studying for a degree in Engineering Physics between 1995 and 2000. Loureiro took the course during the same period, the institute said.
“My understanding is that they did know each other,” said Leah Foley, U.S. attorney for the District of Massachusetts.
He probably was aware of Loureiro’s career trajectory over the years – upward – compared to his own downward path. The classroom at Brown, in which he had apparently taken classes, was the scene of the crime – and the “crime” in his own mind was probably the fact that he never amounted to anything professionally after dropping out of Brown.
Envy. Spite.
Neves Valente was also a visa lottery winner – that’s how he came here again, in 2017. So it’s after 2017 that he has the opportunity to revisit those places and that person, which could explain some of the delay in taking his revenge. There also could be something else in the timing – drug or alcohol abuse, relationship failures, mid-life angst, worsening of schizophrenia or other mental illness, or just a final realization that at 48 he’s never going to make it, never going to fulfill even a fraction of that early promise.
According to the parents of Neves Valente, a break with family occurred over 20 years ago. His age at the time is very consistent with a schizophrenic onset:
When Claudio Neves Valente, a promising physics student in Portugal, headed off to graduate school at Brown University more than 25 years ago, he seemed to have a promising career in science ahead. Soon after, though, he stopped taking classes. Then he cut off all contact with his family back home, a relative said.
In fact, he seemed to vanish.
His mother and father had not seen or heard from him until Friday, when they saw his image in news reports and learned that he was accused in the shooting of students in one of Brown’s science buildings and of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor he had once one to school with in Portugal. …
“They are devastated,” Mirita Domingues, a relative of Mr. Neves Valente’s, told The New York Times. “His mother said this morning that she had always worried that the next time she would hear about him, he would be dead.”
The only child of a well-to-do family … He excelled in school, scoring top grades in every subject …
The article goes on to say that he had been a happy child, and that at eighteen he represented Portugal at the International Physics Olympiad, and was the brightest of the four Portuguese representatives. His high school physics teacher said he was the brightest student he’d ever taught, and that he’d never forgotten him.
And I think it’s very telling that the article goes on to quote a teacher from the school attended by both Neves Valente and Loureiro as saying that although they both were at the top of the class, it was Neves Valente who had the higher grades.
And yet in ensuing years at Brown, where he spent three semesters at the turn of the century, he already was withdrawing socially, according Scott Watson, his only friend at the time who is now a physics professor at Syracuse and says:
“[Neves Valente] wanted to isolate himself” …
Dr. Watson reclled 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. …
Mr. Neves Valente could be “kind and gentle” his former friend recalled – as well as brilliant. But the suspect could also be a bully, Dr. Watson said, going so far as to call a Brazilian classmate his “slave.”
He left Brown without even getting his Master’s degree, much less a doctorate. He apparently went back to Portugal initially, although no one seems to know how or where he spent the ensuing years until his return to the US in 2017. Even after that, little is known until the murders; an address in Miami turns out to have probably been a false one.
NOTE: He sounds a bit like the path of the Unibomber – from academic prodigy (math in the case of Kaczynski) to dropout in his 20s, to isolation, to murder – although the motives for the Unibomber’s murders seems different.
Very interesting, Neo, and thanks for this research. The guess at some sort of psychotic breakdown in his early 20s, perhaps drug-induced, sounds plausible. What a sad loss of so much potential, so say nothing of the lives he took before ending his own.
Did anyone else catch that mutual admiration self stimulatory press conference from providence Thursday night.
Contrast that with Foleys Boston conference.
”Perhaps he even thought the class he shot up at Brown was a physics class…”
I think that might be true. I think his primary target might have been physics students at Brown, and when he learned that he had shot up an economics class instead, he then chose the MIT professor as his secondary target.
Schizophrenia is a terrible mental illness of unknown cause or causes. Let us stop being silly in invoking “maybe a drug caused ” schizophrenia. Taking a mind-altering drug can be a signal of descent into schizophrenia.
CICERO:
Who here said a drug caused schizophrenia? I was listing a number of possible causes of Neves Valente’s decline. One possibility is drug or alcohol abuse. Another is schizophrenia beginning in his twenties. I listed quite a few more possibilities.
Well, Cicero, of course most cases of schizophrenia are not drug-caused, and the drug use is a self-medication (a symptom rather than the cause). However, there are lots of examples of schizophrenia beginning with cannabis use, so this is possible as well.
The guess at some sort of psychotic breakdown in his early 20s, perhaps drug-induced, sounds plausible.
Pure conjecture, without any factual basis. When someone commits random (or seemingly random) acts of violence and murder, the last thing I think motivated that person is schizophrenia or even mental illness. It is undeniably comforting, after a fashion, to attribute such acts to some form of brain defect or mental illness. Because if brain defect and/or mental illness is the cause then we can breath a sigh of a relief knowing that we don’t have to confront ourselves with the very difficult issues of agency and evil at play.
He was an arrogant, angry, antisocial weirdo who decided that he was not bound by civilized constraints and, in Nietzsche’s words, “beyond good and evil.”
That’s not mental illness. The motive is plain.
IrishOtter:
The idea of schizophrenia is not because of the murders. Most schizophrenics are not murderers and most murderers are not schizophrenics. It is the sudden personality changes in the 20s, and the subsequent isolation and sudden cutoff from family with whom he previously seems to have been on good terms, that suggests schizophrenia. He would have been schizophrenic for several decades by the time of the murders, and something else probably triggered them.
In my post at 5:34 I was referring to Ted Kaczynski.
“Gonçalves, who is now the president of the department, told CBS News that Neves Valente was the best student in his course.
Gonçalves also said he knew Louriero, but only from meeting him in later years after he left university, and he has no memory of him as a student.” [Italics mine]
One of these is false. So what credibility do we have here?
Something happened to him. So far we can only make an intelligent guess.
Maybe he just went bad and became an a**hole. That would be my first guess.
What is worse? The young republican was essentially a random victim and not a specific target?
T:
Why false? He remembers one but not the other.
Valente had been dead for two days from self- inflicted. They are trying to show there’s a conflict of time to commit both crimes.
That’s a long, long time to simmer in hate. Might he have had other mental issues or even been relatively normal until recently?
Looked at rationally, shooting up a random class in once-familiar classroom building on the way to killing the prof seems really silly. Rationally, it reduces the chances of success in Brookline, so he must have been really, really wired about Brown.
He was careful, taking measures which, rationally, would help him succeed, in a completely irrational endeavor. At what point did the rational/irrational break occur?
Whatever the underlying causes, I have to agree with IrishOtter that the murders were objectively evil, and the man was rational enough (based on how he carried this out) to bear moral responsibility for what he did.
Re:: Schizophrenia and drugs
My understanding is that psychedelics, marijuana and amphetamines can trigger schizophrenia or psychosis in vulnerable individuals. Schizophrenia is currently understood as a syndrome, not a single disease.
Today’s studies of psychedelics exclude subjects with a history of schizophrenia or schizophrenia in close family members.
It is complicated stuff that they are still sorting it out. Three members of my extended family seem to have gone that way. They ended up on antipsychotics and had difficult lives.
Richard Aubrey:
It doesn’t sound like his behavior has been “normal” for the past 20 years. But there’s no evidence of violence till recently.
Sennacherib:
Where’s the conflict? The Brown murders were on Saturday. The MIT professor was killed on Monday. Neves Valente was found dead on Thursday, and apparently had killed himself on Tuesday.
Neo,
How can a professor cite a person as the best student in his course but have no memory of that best student in his course?
If he has no memory of that student, then he has no basis for labeling him the best student in his course.T
Neo,
How can a professor cite a person as the best student in his course but have no memory of that best student in his course?
If he has no memory of that student, then he has no basis for labeling him the best student in his course.
@T== He was referring to two different people. First the “shooter” that he described as the “best student”. The second was the MIT professor who was murdered on Monday night, who went through the same course as #1 but apparently did not impress him as a student.
Two different students, two different impressions.
Another Mike,
Somehow I did not pick uponthat. Thank you.
Another Mike,
Somehow I did not pick up on that. Thank you.
According to MIT’s website, Loureiro
So if Neves Valente was back in Portugal, and Loureiro was back at IST from 2009-2016, it’s possible they had some interaction during those years. But how could Gonçalves say he knew Loureiro “only from meeting him in later years after he left university” when it seems they were colleagues at IST for seven years? Is IST such a big place that Gonçalves can say that?
Makes a lot of sense. I was thinking that perhaps Neves Valente imagined that Loureiro “stole” his ideas and concepts was allowed to by Brown and their professors. I wondered if Neves Valente believed Loureiro’s success was based on his “stolen” ideas and he’s been nursing grudges for 25 + yrs. Maybe more, back to school in Portugal. This is not to eliminate the possible schizophrenia. Neo has training in psychology. I have none but am aware that schizophrenia frequently manifests at the approx. age Neves Valente was when at Brown. It doesn’t seem that he left much evidence (writings, manifesto, et al) but maybe something will be discovered… All around it’s a tragedy that is hard to wrap one’s brain around. So is Brown’s President’s insistence that the lack of cameras and an obvious problem allowing Neves Valente to enter the building at all had nothing to do with what happened. It was a gun crime. Just like Bondi Beach was a gun crime according to Australia P.M. Those damn guns! I don’t know how to describe the fact that there are so many who agree with those pathetic self-preserving excuses. What are we going to do without Elise Stefanik in Congress to point out the absurdity of those claims from “leaders” like Brown’s President? It’s a shame the Australian PM can’t be called before our Congress so his politics and anti-Semitism can’t be displayed before the world. Because all the world should be paying attention!
“only from meeting him in later years after he left university” when it seems they were colleagues at IST for seven years? Is IST such a big place that Gonçalves can say that?
==
The paraphrase said that Gonçalves offered he had no memory of Loureiro ‘as a student’. He completed his dissertation prior to 2009.
I’m sure we will find out more about Valente.
Whether that more will settle our questions is another matter.
I don’t know. You’re probably right, it was the MSM trying the conflict of time gambit.
Neo;
As regards “normal”: He stayed out of trouble to the extent that he had freedom of movement, which means money and no warrants out. Ha managed not to kill anyone, threaten seriously enough to be charged (far as we know), get tied up in some kind of financial situation which kept him flat broke, so forth. His day to day life might have been not “normal” and his interior life may well have been hell on wheels.
But he had everything he needed including organization and resources to come from wherever he’d been, however long he’d been in New England instead of, suppsedly, in Florida. There is some reporting of his ostensible address was fake, and he lived elsewhere. It may not be “normal” to do this, if true, but it takes being coordinated with the real world. Which I guess is my point.
My guess is Neo’s theory will be as good as we will ever hear from the professional analysts.
Bones break. So do brains, so perhaps we are dealing with a psychotic/schizoid scenario much like that of the “Unibomber.” Everything appears normal until something seems to just short-circuit in the person’s mental functioning. It’s a phenomenon that is pretty well documented. We all would prefer a well-defined and identifiable motive for what strikes “normal” folks like us as a horrible and inexplicable event, but I don’t think we are likely to get one here. “Why would someone do something like this?” is a question only normal people pose; for a broken brain, the “why?” can be almost anything.
Please remember as huxley noted schizophrenia is sort of a catch all diagnosis for certain behaviors. It probably has several different underlying physical causes that can manifest in the same way.
In Mr. Valente’s case I think Neo seems on the right track, but at this point unless he left some large swath of his thoughts on social media or a manifesto of some sort we’ll never know. I’m not sure there would be any physical evidence from a normal autopsy that would resolve this, and even a detailed autopsy would likely only help in certain rare cases. I think we’re stuck with this being weird, evil and unexplained, a very unsatisfying state for the loss of three humans and the injuries of several others.
This CNN piece provides more details, and I think supports neo’s conjecture. It seems that even at IST in Lisbon Valente was arrogant and obnoxious, and this carried over into his time at Brown. Classmate at IST Felipe Moura:
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/12/19/us/neves-valente-brown-shooting-classmates-invs
All mental illnesses are, in a sense, syndromes, because once we nail them down, they cease to be mental illnesses. Some people who once would have been described as catatonics are now diagnosed with serious thyroid issues. Epilepsy was a mental illness as long as it was falling over and thrashing around; now a brain storm and not a mental illness.
Report from Fox News–radio–about noon had body armor and some kind of surveillance (?) equipment in the storage facility.
Either overdoing it for the task because the doing itself felt good, or another objective someplace.
Crimes like the infuriating one linked to below have now become so common, these days, that they’ve almost just background noise, and it’s almost always the same story—it’s a perp—usually operating in a liberal city—and with a long rap sheet, often going back years of various offenses, some violent, he is often a drug addict, is also often supposedly “mentally ill,” and has been repeatedly arrested and then very quickly released, to walk the streets again, and to again sucker punch, rob, rape, beat, maim, knife, push people in front of subway trains, or to kill the average citizens who were unlucky enough to cross his path.
Here, for instance, is the story of a 74 year old Seattle woman whose eye was destroyed by one such perp—with a long criminal record—who, in an unprovoked attack, smashed her full force in the face with a board with a bolt sticking out of it.*
This shit has to stop.
Such violent perps deserve no mercy–no bail, no “diversion” programs, no probation, no drug addiction or mental illness defenses allowing them to avoid incarceration.
Tough, year’s long sentences need to be imposed, and these menaces to society need to be locked away for a long, long time, or none of us can really enjoy our lives, go where we want to go, do what we want to do, or walk our streets in safety, and without constantly being on the alert, heads on a swivel, and looking over our backs.
It is said that somewhere around 5% of the population commits 50% or more of the violent crimes, and that they often commit multiple crimes for every one that they are finally arrested for.
Time to concentrate on these criminals.
This situation is one of the reasons for Donald Trump’s election.
* See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2025/12/horror-75-year-old-seattle-woman-loses-her/
Snow on Pine: I concur.
Snow on Pine.
Concur, as with Irish Otter.
However, if we presume the Powers That Be have enough sense to tie their shoes, it must be asked why they are doing what they are obviously doing with its obvious and inevitable results.
While Cloward-Piven seeks to destroy our financial system by appealing to unthinking sympathy–“those unfortunate poor people deserve better”–does this, is this a coordinated attempt to destroy civil society in pursuit, as with C-P, what comes after?
Or do those who release these perps go home giggling?
Snow: “… the average citizens who were unlucky enough to cross his path.” “This shit has got to stop.”
I hope so, but I don’t think so. So, I restrict myself to fairly safe areas, and when I can’t I use The Gift Of Fear.
AppleBetty–Restricting yourself to “fairly safe” areas means that the free enjoyment of your life that you should have has already been compromised and narrowed i.e. with the connivance of many authorities the barbarians are winning.
Hard to really relax and enjoy your life when “situational awareness” is your prime concern and, if you happened to be armed and defend yourself, you have to be worried that–apparently, in far too many jurisdictions–you will be the one charged, not your assailant.
Don’t worry Seattle area police released the illegal immigrant truck driver who is accused of killing a US citizen who was stuck in traffic. The Seattle area police would not turn the perp over to ICE who had the required paperwork.
Progressive anarchy because OMB.
Guess whose lives matter?Citizens of the world, “Imagine” that.
According to the linked item, apparently no major news outlet has thought that this horrendous attack I linked to above was worth reporting on.*
And isn’t that part of the problem, the MSM shielding certain perps when they commit a crime like this, thus, making it seem like there isn’t actually a real problem with random, violent street crime when there actually is.
* See https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/2002852597783535828?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E2002852597783535828%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Finstapundit.com%2F764146%2F
The Emerald City isn’t Oz, Dorothy certainly is not safe.
They just elected a commie so it won’t get better; it isn’t intended to.
Cultures are like aircraft carriers: it takes time, and significant distance, to turn on a new course. Also, they can be sunk by dive bombers and torpedoes.
How’s that for a metaphor.
https://x.com/i/status/2003249877019689142
An update which should lead to some consultations of victims with lawyers.
https://redstate.com/rusty-weiss/2025/12/22/brown-university-custodian-warned-security-multiple-times-that-suspicious-shooter-was-casing-his-target-n2197375
I guess we can see where the brains are at Brown. Our son got a letter regarding football there. Good offer. But he knew from older guys that a varsity slot in college is nearly full-time employment and not worth the effort.
Glad he turned it down. Considering that the homeless and the custodians aren’t teaching classes, I don’t think their degrees are worth much.