Suspect in Brown University Shooting Worked in Portugal After Leaving University

One friend said Claudio Neves Valente appeared to live a detached life, upset that “he couldn’t be the genius he thought he should be.”

Claudio Neves Valente was like a ghost.

He dropped out of Brown University in the early 2000s, and friends and family have said they had no idea what happened to him until he appeared two decades later, accused of killing two students at Brown University and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor this month.

Now, law enforcement officials are piecing together his life in the intervening years and trying to understand what drove him. But Mr. Neves Valente, once known for his intelligence as a young student, led what appears to have been a quiet and disconnected life once he left the university, making his path difficult to track.

Friends and family said they had lost touch with him, and few neighbors recalled his presence. He left few records or traces on the internet.

Originally from Portugal, Mr. Neves Valente was estranged from his family there. But after he left Brown in the spring of 2001, it appears he returned to his home country, where he worked for a major Portuguese internet services provider known as SAPO. He was employed at the Lisbon-based company between 2010 and 2013, according to a spokeswoman for MEO, a telecommunications firm that owns SAPO.

Mr. Neves Valente obtained a visa to come to the United States in 2017, and a police affidavit suggests that he at some point lived north of Miami, in a region with a tight-knit Portuguese community. But his neighbors there, including the owner of the house where he was said to have lived, said they did not remember him.

Amiel Sribman, 49, who lives next door to a house in north Miami that is listed as Mr. Neves Valente’s address by the authorities, said he did not see Mr. Neves Valente coming or going from the house, noting it was the only rental property in an area where most people own their homes.

Mr. Neves Valente emerged into public view this month, when the police said he fatally shot an M.I.T. physicist two days after he opened fire in a Brown lecture hall, killing two students and wounding nine others.

How did this brilliant and once promising student drop out of sight, only to emerge two decades later as, according to the authorities, a killer?

Investigators are still trying to learn the motivations of Mr. Neves Valente, 48, whose body was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage locker he had rented. Kristy dosReis, spokeswoman for the Providence Police, said they had not found a manifesto or any other written explanation so far.

The F.B.I. will analyze his behavior going back years, even decades, with the aim of developing what is called a behavioral analysis, said Mary Ellen O’Toole, a retired F.B.I. profiler who now directs the forensic science program at George Mason University.

This process would continue despite his death and could take weeks or months, added Dr. O’Toole, who is not involved in the investigation but has closely followed news reports.

The suspect’s motivations may trace back years.

“We’re trained to look for pathways to violence,” said Dr. O’Toole, who spent 15 years with the F.B.I.’s behavioral analysis unit in Quantico, Va. “Were there any indications when he was younger that he was thinking about acting out violently towards other people — not homicide, but smaller, less serious actions towards other people?”

In addition to searching for a manifesto, she said, field agents will look for reports on his work performance and may seek outside experts in psychology and neurology.

Mr. Neves Valente’s early life was in Portugal, where he studied physics — along with the M.I.T. professor, Nuno F.G. Loureiro — at Instituto Superior Técnico, the country’s premier school for science and engineering. After graduating among the top students in his class, Mr. Neves Valente was enrolled at Brown for just a few months, from the fall of 2000 to the spring of 2001, and then took a leave of absence, according to Christina Paxson, Brown’s president.

He formally withdrew from the university in July 2003 and had no active affiliation with the school for over two decades, she said.

In May 2001, he apparently posted a sarcastic message on a university message board: “Due to overwhelming popular demand I wrote something on this page: !?!HAPPY NOW!?!” He went on to announce that he was “back home” and was dropping out of Brown’s Ph.D. program permanently. At the same time, he invited people to email him.

Scott Watson, a physics professor at Syracuse University, who described himself as Mr. Neves Valente’s best and perhaps only friend at Brown, said that his friend was very intelligent, but also inflated small insults into major injuries.

“He was just really an introvert and upset at essentially the fact that he couldn’t be the genius he thought he should be,” Dr. Watson said. He recalled that “even a typo in a textbook” would upset his friend.

“He had this thing that he had to be No. 1, and the fact is, he kind of did know everything,” Dr. Watson said. “He should already have had a Ph.D., and I think he was frustrated at that.”

But, Dr. Watson said he never wondered what had happened to Mr. Neves Valente between then and now: “He just disappeared.”

When he saw a video of Mr. Neves Valente pacing with his hands clasped behind his back, he immediately recognized his former friend through his body language.

About 80 percent of targeted attacks like the one at M.I.T. are motivated by a personal grievance. That might be “a loss in work or love or both,” said Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist and expert witness.

Cautioning that he was speaking generically because there was not enough information yet to form a portrait of Mr. Neves Valente, Dr. Meloy said that these attackers acted out of loss, humiliation, anger or blame. The majority do not have a mental disorder, he said, contrary to the public perception.

Such attackers are meticulous planners, Dr. Meloy said, and may spend months or years thinking about the attack, incubating it and even studying the behaviors of their target.

“Oftentimes,” Dr. Meloy added, “there is a precipitating event that begins the clock. It could be an acute loss, or a reminder.”

Dr. Loureiro, the M.I.T. professor, and Mr. Neves Valente both studied physics at Instituto Superior Técnico from 1995 to 2000. Dr. Loureiro became a star in his field, while Mr. Neves Valente dropped out.

In 2024, Dr. Loureiro won a prestigious appointment, as the director of M.I.T.’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, one of the school’s largest labs. This past January, the White House named him as one of nearly 400 people awarded with the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the U.S. government for outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers.

Mr. Neves Valente did not appear to have acted impulsively with the attacks, officials said. He had car rentals in Massachusetts extending back to February 2025 and including dates in April, October and November, along with the period when the shootings took place in December, according to law enforcement officials. Dr. Loureiro lived in the Boston suburb of Brookline, and was shot at his home.

Dr. O’Toole, the former F.B.I. agent, said Mr. Neves Valente had all the characteristics of what criminologists call an “injustice collector” — someone who cannot let go of what they perceive as insults.

“They go through life, and they tend to think that they’re superior to others,” she said. “They are remarkably ultrasensitive to perceived slights or put-downs, and they blame other people when their life just doesn’t go well.”

The evidence that has trickled out so far supports this characterization, Dr. O’Toole added.

Along with Dr. Loureiro, the victims were MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, 18, and Ella Cobbs Cook, 19, and their funerals were held over the last week. Ms. Cook’s funeral was held at her church in Alabama on Monday, while family and friends of Mr. Umurozokov and Dr. Loureiro said they were remembered in private services.

Chelsia Rose Marcius, David C. Adams, Dana Goldstein, Sarah Mervosh, Patricia Mazzei, Patricia Fonseca and Jenna Russell contributed reporting. Georgia Gee and Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

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