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

Decades before this week’s manhunt through New England ended with the discovery of his body at 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 any motive that could explain his actions.

Officials believe Neves Valente was responsible for 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, and said he 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. Both Neves Valente and Loureiro attended the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon from 1995 to 2000, according to the school, which said that both were enrolled 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.

“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.

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.

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 as a Ph.D. student in the physics 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.

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. A former colleague described him as a popular professor who enjoyed engaging with his students.

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.”