Crime scene tape is seen on campus at Brown University following a mass shooting last week that left two people dead in Providence, Rhode Island. Photo / Getty Images
The two young men were peers, brilliant aspiring scientists working towards a degree at Portugal’s most prestigious engineering school, a white building at the top of a grassy plaza in Lisbon.
A quarter of a 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 behaviour of plasmas.
Claudio Neves Valente was living in Miami, Florida, his scientific career long discarded.
Last Tuesday NZT, Valente hunted down Loureiro, authorities said, shooting him at the home he shared with his wife and three daughters near Boston. Loureiro died early the next day.
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.
An autopsy conducted on Saturday by the New Hampshire medical examiner’s office concluded that Valente died last Wednesday from a gunshot wound to the head.
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 Tecnico and then at Brown.
At Brown, Valente targeted a building at the heart of the university’s physics programme.
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.
In Loureiro’s case, authorities believe the two men knew each other.
In 1995, both were enrolled in the physical and technological engineering programme at Tecnico, as the school is known in Portugal, and graduated in 2000.
Valente left with near-perfect grades, either close to or at the top of his class, the university said.
Nuno Morais, 48, a fellow Tecnico 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.
He 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 slaying 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 deep disappointment to him.
“Tragedies like this should make us think carefully about the mental health toll” of a “hypercompetitive culture”, Morais said.
After studying together in 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 autumn of 2000.
At an orientation seminar ahead of the semester, Valente sat alone, recalled Scott Watson, a fellow incoming student.
“He was socially awkward, and so was I, which I think is why we connected,” Watson wrote in an email. “I was essentially his only friend.”
Soon, Valente was sharing misgivings about his move to the US and about Brown, too.
“He would say the classes were too easy - honestly, for him they were,” wrote Watson, who now teaches at Syracuse University. “I don’t like the word genius, but he was.”
Valente’s list of grievances only seemed to grow, and some of his behaviour didn’t go over well with his classmates, according to Watson.
Valente used to insult a fellow physics student from Brazil, calling him his “slave”, Watson wrote.
The taunting “started out playful and then got violent”, Watson said, recalling that he once had to break up a fight between the two.
In 2001, Valente decided to leave Brown.
There was nothing left for him to learn from his courses, he told Watson as they walked the streets of Providence, Rhode Island, and he was returning to Portugal.
That was the last time Watson heard from him.
Watson was shocked by the tragedy at Brown but immediately recognised the location of the shooting: the Barus and Holley physics building where he and Valente attended classes.
In the spring of 2001, Valente took a leave of absence from Brown. He formally withdrew in July 2003 without receiving a degree, Paxson said, and since then has had no affiliation with the university.
Valente’s graduate student webpage from that era appears to reflect an ambivalent relationship to the programme.
“!?!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 programme.
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 US, where Valente became a legal permanent resident in 2017.
While Loureiro remained in touch with friends from the Tecnico 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 US. On Saturday, residents of the middle-class suburb about 25km north of downtown Miami where Valente listed his address said they did not know him or had only seen him fleetingly.
After he was shown Valente’s photo, a neighbour across the street, Jay Torres, 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, as well as the Nissan Sentra he drove to Providence.
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 started shooting on December 13.
Authorities tracking Valente’s movements the day of the Brown shooting say he was caught on surveillance footage on the residential streets surrounding the campus as early as 10.30am local time that morning. Just after 4pm local time, he walked into a lecture hall in the Barus and Holley building and opened fire, they said.
Students who survived the attack at Brown described a shooter bursting into the room carrying a gun with a green laser sight. He walked down the aisles and shot indiscriminately at terrified students, according to the arrest affidavit prepared by Rhode Island authorities.
When investigators later showed surveillance photos of the man to hospitalised survivors in the hope they could identify the shooter, one began “tearing up and shaking” in recognition, according to the affidavit.
Ella Cook from Alabama, and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov from Virginia, were killed in the attack. Nine other students were wounded.
After the shooting, Valente made his way to Massachusetts. He took steps to evade detection, authorities said, including using an untraceable phone and credit cards issued in a name other than his own.
He placed an unregistered Maine licence plate over the actual one on his rental car to help conceal his identity.
Valente surfaced on surveillance footage two days later, according to a court document.
He was caught on camera 70km to the north of Providence in Brookline, a tranquil and prosperous enclave next to Boston. He shot Loureiro, his former classmate, repeatedly before fleeing, authorities said.
From there, police said, Valente drove to a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, where he killed himself. Law enforcement personnel found his body on Friday.
Loureiro’s killing has devastated his family, friends and colleagues. The family is in the process of arranging a funeral, said Eurydice Hirsey, a friend of Loureiro’s wife. Last week, there was a candlelight vigil near their home.
Tributes to Loureiro have poured in. His students described him as kind, funny and charismatic. Loureiro was “not only a brilliant scientist, he was a brilliant person,” said Dennis Whyte, an MIT engineering professor. The “loss is immeasurable”.
- Todd Wallack, Susan Svrluga, Evan Hill and Andrew Jeong contributed to this report.
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