‘Brilliant but angry and difficult guy’: What former classmates said about Brown University, MIT shooting suspect

Authorities have not found any notes or other leads he has left behind on what triggered a once promising physics student to commit one of the most shocking crimes in the US in recent times.

Claudio Neves Valente and Nuno Loureiro were classmates

The only links the authorities have been able to establish so far are that Valente and Loureiro, both hailing from Portugal, were once classmates.

Both were students at Lisbon’s elite Instituto Superior Tecnico in their native Portugal in the late 1990s.

Valente became a teaching assistant at the institute before his contract was terminated in February 2000.

From Portugal to US

Valente was also briefly enrolled as a promising young doctoral student in the physics department at Brown University before dropping out.

Brown University President Christina Paxson wrote in a message to the campus on Friday that Valente was enrolled in a physics PhD program for a few months in 2000 to 2001.

Any affiliation Valente had with Brown ended in 2003, when he dropped out after a long leave of absence, according to university officials and investigators.

Loureiro, meanwhile, went on to Imperial College London, getting his physics PhD and working in theoretical physics and its applications in fusion. In 2009, he became a researcher at Lisbon’s Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion, before moving to the US in ‌2016 to become a professor at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

What other classmates said

Felipe Moura, a classmate of the duo recalled Valente as someone who was brilliant, but difficult to deal with.

“Claudio was obviously one of the best, but in class he had a great need to stand out and show that he was better than the rest,” CNN, quoting Moura’s Facebook post in Portuguese, reported.

“Claudio’s attitude was unpleasant,” he continued, often arguing with “colleagues he didn’t consider as brilliant as him (and who probably weren’t),” he wrote. “They were totally unnecessary quarrels, which did not help the class at all.”

Dr. Bruno Nobre, a professor and dean at the Catholic University of Portugal who also graduated from IST alongside the two men in 2000, also corroborated the description of Valente.

“Claudio was a brilliant student and a very friendly colleague,” Nobre told ABC News.

According to Nobre, when they were students at IST, Valente and Loureiro had a “very normal” relationship as classmates.

“I don’t believe they were very close,” he said.

Two brilliant minds, two different paths

While Loureiro went on to become a notable academic at MIT, what Valente was up to is unclear.

Before his death, Valente was renting a room in a home in a working-class Miami neighbourhood. One witness to the Brown shooting noted Valente was wearing the kinds of pants and shoes that are typical of restaurant workers.