In the fall of 2013, Claudio Neves Valente, once a top student in Portugal’s most prestigious physics program, was coming undone. A younger cousin had died in a fiery car crash with four friends, a blameless tragedy that followed years of Mr. Neves Valente’s own troubles.
Mr. Neves Valente had not seen his parents in years, though they lived a short drive from his home in Lisbon. His mother would sometimes try to visit, pleading for him to come out. But he never answered.
At the funeral, he refused to speak with his family, then left without a goodbye. Not long after, he handed in his resignation at a Portuguese internet company where he had worked for seven years.
Then he vanished. Friends and family would not hear of him again until more than a decade later, when the authorities identified Mr. Neves Valente as the suspect in the killing of two Brown University students and an M.I.T. professor in December.
From 2013 on, Mr. Neves Valente left almost no signs of where he lived or worked, in Portugal or the United States. He stopped responding to former colleagues, or attending the dinners held by his college classmates. And he never saw his family again, according to interviews with relatives and friends of the family.
His mother told friends and neighbors that Mr. Neves Valente had mental health issues but refused to seek treatment. Recently, she confided to a relative her fear that the next time she got word of Claudio, he would be dead.
Instead, Mr. Neves Valente’s name emerged as a suspect in an indiscriminate shooting and a targeted murder. In addition to the two students who died, nine others were injured. Mr. Neves Valente killed himself not long after, concluding a spree of violence that took aim at two of America’s most elite universities, and that left his native Portugal reeling.
This account of Mr. Neves Valente’s life is based on interviews with over a dozen of his former classmates, co-workers, neighbors and relatives.
On Tuesday, the Justice Department released transcripts of four recordings Mr. Neves Valente made after the shootings, rambling diatribes in which he describes the attacks and refuses to apologize for them. The videos were found with his body in a storage facility in Salem, N.H., where he hid after the killing of the M.I.T. professor.
He cited grievances against unnamed people and discarded any suggestion that he was mentally ill, casting the shootings as acts of defiance and revenge in a world that “cannot be redeemed.” He appeared to take solace in the fact that he “wouldn’t be the one who ended up suffering the most from all of this,” according to a transcript provided by the U.S. attorney in Massachusetts.
The expletive-laced transcripts, which officials translated from Portuguese into English, are an incoherent manifesto of sorts, but offer little insight into Mr. Neves Valente’s motives.
Mr. Neves Valente’s former college classmates, however, watched the news in horror from afar and immediately knew the connection between Mr. Neves Valente and his victims. A group chat with members from their graduating class — many of them now businessmen and scientists at world-renowned institutions — lit up with messages of shock and baffled sadness.
They also began to develop a theory about what they believe could have driven Mr. Neves Valente to violence.
Whether mental illness played a role in Mr. Neves Valente’s alleged turn to violence may never be known. But people who knew him said that his life became consumed by frustration and grievance as he grew older, and may have contributed to whom he allegedly chose to target.
His former friends recalled his frustration with Brown University, where he was briefly a doctoral student, in 2000, before leaving a year later. Mr. Neves Valente had talked about his disappointment in what he saw as a lack of rigor in the physics program, as though the school had failed him.
And they knew of his shared past with Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a well-regarded physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They had studied together from 1995 to 2000 at the Instituto Superior Técnico, one of Portugal’s finest universities, where Mr. Neves Valente was consistently at the top of his class — but Mr. Loureiro was not.
While Mr. Neves Valente had watched his aspirations crumble in the ensuing years, Mr. Loureiro had become one of the most celebrated Portuguese scientists in the United States, running a cutting-edge laboratory at M.I.T.
Mr. Neves Valente had desperately wanted to attend M.I.T. as a graduate student, according to his former classmates. They now believe he harbored deep resentment about his former friend’s success. Rather than blame himself for not living up to his potential, Mr. Neves Valente blamed others for his failure.
“It was almost like Claudio was a passenger in his own life, not responsible or accountable for any of the things that happened to him,” said Nelson Sousa, a classmate from Técnico.
Still, his classmates said it was difficult to connect the monstrous acts to the young man they had known for five of the most formative years of their lives. Nearly everyone recalled him as a friend and a brilliant student.
He was just as socially awkward, competitive and arrogant as many others in their group of self-described science nerds. Back then, he happily assisted others who needed help with advanced concepts, like relativistic particle physics.
His decline appears to have started in his mid-20s, after his return from Brown, when he stopped speaking to neighbors and began avoiding his family.
“My theory is that in his brain that was probably already broken back then, in a dark place behaving as a loner and resentful that the world did not recognize him for the brilliant guy he was,” Mr. Sousa said, “he saw Nuno’s success as insulting because he considered Nuno his intellectual inferior.”
But friends noted that Mr. Loureiro had sought to learn from his failures, as he described in a self-effacing speech in the summer of 2018 for a speaking series on resilience.
“If you’re not failing all the time, you’re aiming too low,” he said.
Friends recall Mr. Loureiro as easygoing and humble, the sort of student who grew even if he was never the top of his class.
Mr. Neves Valente had shone from the very beginning, from his high school years through college, where he tied with one other student for the top score in a class of 45. But as he prepared for graduate school, with his heart set on M.I.T., he had a stumble, his former classmates recalled. He did not score well on the graduate school admissions test, putting the most elite physics programs out of reach.
He was accepted at Brown, where his classes felt easy, covering material he had learned in his undergraduate coursework, friends said. But a few wondered why Mr. Neves Valente didn’t stick it out anyway, or why, if he felt the program was beneath him, he never applied anywhere else.
“Nuno created mechanisms to deal with failure,” said Paolo Aguiar, a classmate during his college days. “With Claudio,” he added, “he was always top of his world up to a very late stage in his life, but once he began failing he didn’t have the mechanisms for that.”
When he returned to Portugal, Mr. Neves Valente posted a disgruntled note online, “!?!HAPPY NOW!?!”
Back home, Mr. Neves Valente found work in information technology at an internet company called SAPO. There, he once again stood out among his peers. Colleagues recalled him as competent and polite, if aloof. Still, he often joined them for after-work drinks and dinners, they said.
“He was an extraordinary professional, he did things that few people were capable of doing,” said Sergio Bastos, who worked with Mr. Neves Valente for seven years. “He was very rigorous.”
He was also lonely, Mr. Bastos said.
“I think one of the great regrets he had was that he couldn’t create his own family,” Mr. Bastos said. “He had few social skills and I don’t think he had any girlfriends in the years we worked together.”
Mr. Bastos considered Mr. Neves Valente one of his closest friends at the time. But when Mr. Neves Valente decided to quit around the fall of 2013, he didn’t even bother telling Mr. Bastos.
“He didn’t leave any contact information, didn’t say where he was going or what he was going to do, nothing,” he said. “He arrived at the office one day, said it was his last day, handed in his laptop and left.”
Though Mr. Bastos tried for months to keep in touch, he never got a single response.
Mr. Neves Valente’s abrupt resignation was not long after his cousin’s funeral, in August 2013, where Mr. Neves Valente’s family saw him for the first time in years, according to friends of his family. (Mr. Neves Valente’s parents declined to be interviewed.)
A 22-year-old second cousin had died alongside four other university friends as they drove home from vacation. Two others had also died in the head-on collision, making it one of the worst accidents in Portugal that year.
At the funeral, his family tried to speak with Mr. Neves Valente, who was 36 at the time, but he refused, as he had in the past, according to two relatives.
Over the years, his parents had tried to visit him at his apartment in Lisbon, a small flat they had purchased for him while he was studying for his undergraduate degree. His mother would spend entire days idling in the stairwell, hoping to spot her son, neighbors said.
Mr. Neves Valente hadn’t always been so distant, said Maria Margarida Baptista, 78, who lived above him in their eight-story condominium building in Lisbon’s Olivais neighborhood. During his university years, he was polite and even helped her manage the building, she said.
Then he left to attend Brown. After he returned, he grew remote and avoided conversations with her altogether. At one point, worried he might be dead, his parents called the authorities to break into the apartment and look for him, she said.
Their act of desperation left them further estranged from him. The family told friends that their son needed help but refused to seek it, without ever describing his condition.
And yet his appearance at the 2013 funeral had renewed their hope that they might reconnect with him, according to friends and a relative. And so the family decided to try and visit him again in Lisbon.
Only this time, they discovered that the locks to the apartment had been changed. Mr. Neves Valente, without their knowledge, had sold the place, said another neighbor, Teresa Ruas.
The family was devastated, she said. They knew that with the last remaining tie to him severed, they might never see him again.
“They never told me what Claudio’s real problem was,” said Mrs. Ruas, who has remained in contact with Mr. Neves Valente’s mother. “They only said it was a psychological issue and that he refused to seek treatment.”
On Tuesday, seated in her apartment, Mrs. Ruas called Mr. Neves Valente’s mother, who wept on the phone and said she hardly knew anything herself, only that he had needed help for years, and had refused.
Tiago Carrasco contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
Azam Ahmed is international investigative correspondent for The Times. He has reported on Wall Street scandals, the War in Afghanistan and violence and corruption in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.
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