Brown suspect was once a top student in Portugal with a promising future

Decades before this week’s manhunt in New England ended with the discovery of his body in a warehouse, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente was an academic powerhouse in his home country of Portugal. Enrolled in one of the country’s most prestigious engineering schools, Neves Valente graduated first in his class, seemingly poised for a bright future.

Today, Neves Valente is dead at age 48, suspected of committing two shocking acts of violence – and authorities in the United States and Portugal are searching for a motive that could explain his actions.

Authorities believe Neves Valente was behind a mass shooting that killed two students and injured nine others Saturday at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He is also suspected of fatally shooting Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro, 47, at Loureiro’s home in the Boston suburb of Brookline on Monday.

The shootings hit residents of Rhode Island and Massachusetts as days passed with no one in custody. Then, on Thursday, authorities announced they had approached a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, where they found the body of Neves Valente, who appeared to have died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Little is known about how he chose his targets, although Neves Valente has past ties to Brown and Loureiro.

A Providence police affidavit says Neves Valente came to the United States to attend Brown University from August 2000 to spring 2001 on a physics doctoral student visa. program. He requested a leave of absence from the school in 2001 and ultimately withdrew in 2003, the affidavit states.

Neves Valente did not earn a degree during his time there, Brown’s president said in an email, and he currently had no affiliation with the university. The email indicated that during his three semesters at Brown, Neves Valente most likely spent time at Barus & Holley, the building where Saturday’s massacre occurred.

Scott Watson told NBC News that he attended Brown with Neves Valente and was his only friend there. He said Neves Valente was socially awkward and often complained about Brown.

“He said the classes were too easy – honestly, for him, they were,” Watson wrote in an email. “He already knew most of the material and was really impressive.”

“He could be kind and gentle, although he often became frustrated – sometimes angry – about classes, professors and living conditions,” Watson wrote.

Watson recalled a conflict Neves Valente had with another student whom he said Neves Valente would refer to as a “slave” because the student was from Brazil.

“I had to break up a fight once,” he wrote.

Before that, Neves Valente and Loureiro, an MIT professor, had attended the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, according to the school, which said they were enrolled from 1995 to 2000 in the engineering physics technology undergraduate program. Rogério Colaço, president of the Instituto Superior Técnico, told the Portuguese newspaper Expresso that Neves Valente obtained a final average of 19 out of 20, an exceptionally high score, especially considering the rigor of the university.

Even before starting college, Neves Valente had made a strong impression academically. He represented Portugal at the International Physics Olympiad for secondary school students in 1995, in Canberra, Australia, as shown in an extract from the scientific publication Gazeta da Física.

Yet Neves Valente seems to have left little imprint on those with whom he studied.

“Most of his classmates have no memory of Cláudio Valente, other than the fact that he was the best student in the program that year,” Colaço told Expresso.

Loureiro, meanwhile, was a researcher at the plasmas and nuclear fusion unit at the Instituto Superior Técnico and was described in a school release as a “brilliant colleague.”

“His friends and colleagues at IPFN and Técnico, some of whom have continued to collaborate with Nuno to this day, are deeply grieved by his untimely death,” the statement said. “We remember a brilliant colleague, with whom it was a scientific and personal pleasure to collaborate.”

Alex Schekochihin, a longtime friend and colleague of Loureiro, said in an email that it was hard to find someone who didn’t like Loureiro.

“He was a fantastic physicist, a highly effective leader with a clear vision and sophisticated sense of strategy, and an extraordinary human being,” he wrote.

What Neves Valente accomplished personally or professionally after graduation is not as clear.

The Providence police affidavit says Neves Valente was granted legal permanent resident status in 2017. Public records show he was living in Las Vegas that year and, more recently, appeared to be residing in Miami. He had rented a hotel room in Boston twice in late November, an FBI agent wrote in a separate affidavit.

A tipster on the Reddit discussion forum led authorities to track down Neves Valente after the shooting. The Portuguese Criminal Police, Portugal’s investigative force, said it was cooperating with U.S. authorities in the investigation.

The Brown University students killed in Saturday’s attack have been identified as Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook. His aunt remembers Umurzokov, originally from Uzbekistan, as kind and intelligent; Cook, of Birmingham, Alabama, had served as vice president of the Brown University Republican Caucus and was described by her church as an “incredible, grounded, faithful, shining light.”

Loureiro was a world-renowned plasma physicist and fusion scientist who joined MIT in 2016. In a video posted to YouTube earlier this year, Loureiro talked about his work and offered advice to students in his field.

“I think every day it’s tempting to go for the low-hanging fruit,” he said. “Be a little more ambitious and tackle the really tough problems.”