As investigators work to discover a motive behind the mass capturing at Brown University and the slaying of an acclaimed MIT professor, former classmates of the accused killer described him as an excellent but exceptionally difficult scholar.
Claudio Neves Valente, the 48-year-old suspect who police say was discovered useless Thursday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, was a high scholar but a disruptive character in his native Portugal, recalled classmates on Friday.
Neves Valente studied at Instituto Superior Técnico together with Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor he’s now accused of capturing to loss of life. The college confirmed to NCS that each males have been college students there between 1995 and 2000, and that Neves Valente studied for a level in Technological Physics Engineering.
That engineering course was filled with gifted college students, recalled classmate Felipe Moura – but Neves Valente stood out, for good and dangerous causes.
“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,” Moura wrote in Portuguese in a Facebook submit.
“Claudio’s attitude was unpleasant,” he continued, typically 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.”
Moura, who now teaches at a Lisbon college, didn’t reply to messages from NCS. A former classmate, who requested to not be quoted by title, confirmed that Moura’s Facebook account was genuine.
In an interview with Público, a newspaper in Portugal, Moura echoed his impressions of Neves Valente as an aggressive classmate.
“He had a confrontational personality in class. In other words, the other good students would intervene, ask questions, [but] Claudio liked to say that he was the one who knew,” Moura informed the paper.
Nuno Morais, one other classmate, informed Público that Neves Valente and Loureiro have been among the many high college students on the college – but their personalities have been starkly completely different.
“Claudio was one of the students with the best grades in the course. He was much more theoretical,” Morais informed the paper. “Nuno was also a good student, he stood out less in terms of grades, but he was a more relaxed person—and seemed to have a knack for slightly more applied subjects.”
After graduating in Portugal, Neves Valente enrolled at Brown University in 2000 as a graduate scholar in physics but didn’t end this system. Moura mentioned he stayed in contact with Neves Valente on the time and discovered that he was as soon as once more clashing with different college students.
“I exchanged many emails with him at the time and saw that he maintained the same attitude — as he told me —of maintaining unnecessary conflicts with PhD colleagues in class, which he again considered far less capable than he was,” Moura wrote on Facebook. “I could tell that he wasn’t enjoying being at Brown University.”
Scott Watson, a classmate at Brown, mentioned Valente was “socially awkward” and that he grew to become his solely good friend on the college. He struggled within the US, complaining bitterly that lessons weren’t difficult and that the meals was poor, Watson recalled.
“He would say the classes were too easy—honestly, for him they were. He already knew most of the material and was genuinely impressive,” Watson, who’s now a professor at Syracuse University, mentioned in a press release shared with NCS.
Watson mentioned Valente might be “kind and gentle” but that he was additionally unstable as nicely.
“He often became frustrated—sometimes angry—about courses, professors, and living conditions,” Watson mentioned, recalling that after he needed to break up a battle between Valente and one other classmate he typically insulted.
Moura mentioned he tried to persuade Valente to stick with the graduate program, but he left after one yr.
“Claudio thought none of it was worth it, which was a waste of time and the others were all incapable,” he mentioned on Facebook.
In an archived Brown web site, Neves Valente seems to write down to classmates that he’s left the college “permanently.” The observe, first reported by the New York Times, contains an e-mail tackle to succeed in him and a cryptic observe: “The best liar is he who is able to fool himself. They are everywhere, but sometimes proliferate in the most unexpected places.”
A listing of physics graduate college students at Brown from that point hyperlinks to the web site alongside a scholar e-mail tackle for Neves Valente. The listing exhibits that he was assigned to room 122 on the Barus and Holley engineering constructing. Neves Valente carried out his capturing in room 166 in the identical constructing final week, police say.
It’s unclear what Neves Valente did within the intervening years. Moura wrote on Facebook that he heard he’d returned to Portugal to work for an web supplier; police say he acquired a visa and returned to the US in 2017, although it’s unclear what he did for work.
His final recognized tackle was in Miami, police mentioned.
His former classmates have been left making an attempt to grasp what might have motivated the brutal violence.
“I never expected he would be capable of such a thing,” Moura wrote.
NCS’s Vasco Cotovio, Thomas Bordeaux, Julia Vargas Jones contributed to this report.