Claudio Neves Valente’s self-described “only friend” at Brown University said he thinks he knows the shooter’s possible motive.
“I’m speculating now, but I mean, I think he went to shoot up the building because it ruined his life because they didn’t provide what he thought he deserved,” Scott Watson, who is now a physics professor at Syracuse University, told Fox News.
Watson and Valente, 48, were former classmates at Brown University, where the shooter attended as a PhD student from fall 2000 until taking a leave of absence in April 2001 and formally withdrawing in July 2003.
“He would make comments that the school was terrible and beneath him, and it wasn’t good enough,” Watson said.
According to people who knew him during his time at Brown, Valente struggled to adjust to life at the university, complaining that classes were too easy and expressing irritation with the food, especially the lack of “high-quality fish.”
“He was one of the smartest people I had met there,” Watson said about his former friend, who on Dec. 13 opened fire at the Barus & Holley building, killing students Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and wounding nine others.
Brown University President Christina Paxson said that “the majority” of physics classes at Brown have always been held within the classrooms and labs at the Barus & Holley building, where Valente opened fire.
“I don’t think we have any idea why now, or why Brown, why these students, why this classroom. That is really unknown to us,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha said at a press briefing shortly after Valente was identified, as authorities continue to search for a motive behind the deadly shooting and have yet to confirm one.
Authorities have also linked Valente to the deadly shooting of Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro, 47, who was killed in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, on Dec. 18.
Loureiro and Valente both attended the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal between 1995 and 2000, where a professor who taught there at the time told the Portuguese newspaper Público that Valente was often confrontational in class, saying he knew the answers rather than asking questions.
Nuno Morais, 48, a former student at the Portuguese university, told the Washington Post that Loureiro and Valente were friendly classmates, though Loureiro was more easygoing than Valente.
“I could tell that he wasn’t enjoying being at Brown University, but I tried to convince him that that would be an early stage, a culture shock, but that that Ph.D. was a great opportunity that he shouldn’t waste,” another former classmate of the shooter in Portugal, Filipe Moura, posted on Facebook about Valente.
“That didn’t work out. Claudio thought none of it was worth it, which was a waste of time, and the others were all incapable,” he added in Portuguese..
In interviews, Watson described an incident at Brown where Valente would “insult” and call one of his Brazilian classmates a “slave,” which once led Watson to break up a fight between them.
Valente was found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a Salem, New Hampshire, storage facility on Dec. 18.
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