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.
