The two young men were peers, brilliant aspiring scientists working toward a degree at Portugal’s most prestigious engineering school, a white building at the top of a grassy plaza in Lisbon.
A quarter-century later, both were in the United States, but their paths had diverged radically.
Nuno Loureiro was a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a beloved mentor who researched the behavior of plasmas. Claudio Neves Valente was living in Miami, his scientific career long discarded.
On Dec. 13, Valente hunted down Loureiro, shooting and killing him at his home near Boston, authorities said.
For Valente, it was the second act in a deadly rampage that began at Brown University 48 hours earlier when he burst into a lecture hall and opened fire, authorities said, killing two undergraduates in an economics study session.
Valente subsequently killed himself in a storage unit in New Hampshire, police said Thursday.
Investigators have not yet revealed a motive for the attacks. But both have links to Valente’s long-ago days as a student, first at the Instituto Superior Técnico and then at Brown.
At Brown, Valente targeted a building at the heart of the university’s physics program. It’s a place where he would have taken classes during his brief time enrolled as a graduate student there in 2000 and 2001, Brown President Christina Paxson told reporters Thursday.
In Loureiro’s case, authorities believe the two men knew each other. In 1995, both were enrolled in the physical and technological engineering program at Técnico, as the school is known in Portugal, and graduated in 2000. Valente left with near-perfect grades, either near or at the top of his class, the university said.
Nuno Morais, 48, a fellow Técnico student at the time, said he knew both men. Valente was one of the best students in the class, he said, highly competitive and driven to succeed but also willing to collaborate with his peers. Valente showed no signs of having mental health struggles back when they were students, Morais said.
Loureiro was also an excellent classmate, Morais said, but more relaxed than Valente. He described both as friendly.
Loureiro’s murder has shocked the scientific and engineering community in Portugal. “In some elite schools, there’s a culture where individual success is measured by academic performance, and in that sense, students usually feel they can only succeed if they are the best of the best,” Morais said.
Valente aspired to have an academic career comparable to Loureiro’s, Morais said. But Valente told Morais his time at Brown was a great disappointment to him, especially after he was one of the top students in his field in Portugal.
“Tragedies like this should make us think carefully about the mental health toll” of a “hypercompetitive culture,” Morais said.
From Lisbon, Loureiro and Valente took different paths. Loureiro, 47, went on to build a stellar career as a theoretical physicist and fusion scientist. He did postdoctoral research at Princeton University and worked at the United Kingdom’s national fusion lab. In 2016, he joined the faculty at MIT, partly because he wanted to teach and work with students.
Valente, 48, started graduate studies in physics at Brown in the fall of 2000. But in the spring of the following year, he took a leave of absence. Valente formally withdrew in July 2003 without receiving a degree, Paxson said Thursday, and since then had no affiliation with the university.
Many of his physics classes would have been at Barus and Holley, the building where the shooting unfolded, according to Paxson. Valente likely “spent a great deal of time” there while he was a student.
A graduate student webpage for Valente from that era appears to reflect an ambivalent relationship to the program. “!?!HAPPY NOW!?!” is written at the top of the page, which he apparently filled out “due to overwhelming popular demand.” Lower down, the page shows that Valente is “back home” and has permanently dropped out of the doctoral program.
It closes with a cryptic remark in Portuguese: “And the moral of the story is, the best liar is the one who can deceive himself. These people exist everywhere, but sometimes they proliferate in the most unexpected places.”
After leaving Brown, Valente returned to Lisbon, said Morais, his former classmate who is now a researcher at the Gulbenkian Institute for Molecular Medicine in Portugal. Valente abandoned his academic pursuits and worked as a programmer for a Portuguese internet company, Morais said. He didn’t know why Valente returned to the U.S., where Valente became a legal permanent resident in 2017.
While Loureiro remained in touch with friends from the Técnico days, Valente distanced himself from his former colleagues, Morais said. As far as Morais knows, the two men weren’t in regular contact.
Investigators are racing to piece together Valente’s life in the United States. Early Friday, residents of the middle-class neighborhood in Miami-Dade County where Valente listed his address said they did not know him, or had only seen him fleetingly.
A neighbor across the street, Jay Torres, after being shown Valente’s photo, said he saw the same man standing outside about a month ago. Valente was in front of the house where he lived, a low-slung yellow bungalow with a circular driveway. He was otherwise unremarkable, Torres said.
By November, Valente was laying the groundwork for the attacks, according to authorities and court documents. Late last month, he rented a hotel room in Boston and later the storage facility in New Hampshire where he would eventually be found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, as well as the Nissan Sentra he drove to Providence, Rhode Island.
In the weeks before the Brown attack, surveillance footage repeatedly captured Valente on the streets around the campus and in the building where, authorities said, he opened fire on Dec. 13.
A Brown University custodian would later tell authorities he saw Valente in a bathroom of the Barus and Holley building, the site of the attack, as early as Nov. 28.
Authorities tracking Valente’s movements the day of the shooting say he was caught on surveillance footage on the residential streets surrounding the campus as early as 10:30 that morning. Six hours later, he walked into the Barus and Holley building’s auditorium and opened fire, they said.
Students who survived the attack at Brown described Valente bursting into the auditorium carrying a gun with a green laser sight. He walked down the aisles and shot indiscriminately toward terrified students, according to the arrest affidavit prepared by Rhode Island authorities.
When investigators later showed surveillance photos of the man to hospitalized survivors in hopes they could identify the shooter, one “quickly froze, pushed back” and began “tearing up and shaking,” according to the affidavit.
Two days later, Valente was 45 miles to the north in Brookline, a tranquil and prosperous enclave next to Boston, authorities said. He shot Loureiro, his former classmate, repeatedly, before fleeing, authorities said.
From there, authorities say, Valente drove to a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, where he later killed himself. Law enforcement personnel found his body on Thursday.
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