Decades before this week’s manhunt through New England ended with the discovery of his body in a storage facility, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente had been an academic powerhouse in his home country of Portugal. Enrolled at one of the country’s most prestigious engineering schools, Neves Valente graduated at the top of his class, seemingly poised for a bright future.
Now, Neves Valente is dead at age 48, suspected of committing two shocking acts of violence — and authorities in both the United States and Portugal are looking for a motive that could explain his actions.
Officials believe Neves Valente was behind a mass shooting that killed two students and injured nine other people on Saturday at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He is also suspected of fatally shooting 47-year-old Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro at Loureiro’s home in the Boston suburb of Brookline on Monday.
The shootings gripped residents of Rhode Island and Massachusetts as days passed without anyone in custody. Then on Thursday, authorities announced they had closed in on a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire, where they found Neves Valente’s body, who appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Little is known about how he chose his targets, though Neves Valente has past connections to Brown and to Loureiro.
A Providence police affidavit says that Neves Valente came to the U.S. to attend Brown University from August 2000 to spring 2001 on a student visa in the physics Ph.D. program. He requested a leave of absence from the school in 2001, and ultimately withdrew in 2003, the affidavit said.
Neves Valente did not obtain a degree during his time there, Brown’s president said in an email, and he did not have a current affiliation with the university. The email said that during his three semesters at Brown, Neves Valente most likely would have spent time in Barus & Holley, the building where Saturday’s massacre occurred.
Scott Watson told NBC News that he attended Brown with Neves Valente and had been his only friend there. He said Neves Valente was socially awkward and would often complain about Brown.
“He would say the classes were too easy — honestly, for him they were,” Watson wrote in an email. “He already knew most of the material and was genuinely impressive.”
“He could be kind and gentle, though he often became frustrated — sometimes angry — about courses, professors, and living conditions,” Watson wrote.
Watson recalled a conflict that 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.
Prior to that time, both Neves Valente and Loureiro, the MIT professor, attended the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, according to the school, which said that they were enrolled from 1995 to 2000 in the undergraduate program in technological physics engineering. Rogério Colaço, the president of Instituto Superior Técnico, told the Portuguese newspaper Expresso that Neves Valente graduated with a final average grade of 19 out of 20 — an exceptionally high score, particularly given how rigorous the university is.
Even before starting college, Neves Valente had made a strong impression academically. He represented Portugal at the 1995 International Physics Olympiad for secondary school students, in Canberra, Australia, a news clip from the science publication Gazeta da Física shows.
Yet Neves Valente seemed to have left little imprint on those he studied with.
“Most classmates have no memory of Cláudio Valente, other than the fact that he was the top student in the program that year,” Colaço told Expresso.
Loureiro, meanwhile, was a researcher at the Instituto Superior Técnico's plasmas and nuclear fusion unit and was described in a statement from the school as a "brilliant colleague."
"His friends and colleagues at IPFN and at Técnico, some of whom continued to collaborate with Nuno to this day, are deeply distressed by his premature passing," 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's, said in an email that it was difficult to find anyone who did not like Loureiro.
"He was a fantastic physicist, a very effective leader with a clear vision and sophisticated sense of strategy, and an amazing human being," he wrote.
What Neves Valente accomplished personally or professionally after graduation is not as clear.
The Providence police affidavit said that Neves Valente obtained legal permanent resident status in 2017. Public records show he lived in Las Vegas that year and, more recently, appeared to reside 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 chat forum Reddit led authorities to track down Neves Valente after the shootings. 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 were identified as Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook. Umurzokov, from Uzbekistan, was remembered by his aunt as kind and smart; Cook, from Birmingham, Alabama, had been the vice president of Brown’s college Republicans group and was described by her church as an “incredible, grounded, faithful, bright light.”
Loureiro had been a world-renowned plasma physicist and fusion scientist who joined MIT in 2016. In a video posted to YouTube earlier this year, Loureiro spoke about his work and offered advice to students in his field.
“I think on any given day, it’s tempting to go for the low-hanging fruit,” he said. “Be a little more ambitious and tackle the really hard problems.”
