As investigators work to uncover the motive behind a mass shooting at Brown University and the slaying of an acclaimed MIT professor, former classmates of the accused killer describe him as a brilliant but exceptionally difficult student.
Claudio Neves Valente, the 48-year-old suspect who police said was found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound Thursday, was a top student but a disruptive figure in his native Portugal, classmates recalled Friday.
Neves Valente studied at the Instituto Superior Técnico with MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, who is now charged with the shooting. The school confirmed to CNN that both men were students there between 1995 and 2000, and that Naves Valente studied for a degree in technological physics engineering.
That engineering course was full of talented students, recalls classmate Felipe Moura — but Neves Valente stood out for good and bad reasons.
“Claudio was clearly one of the best, but in class he had a great need to stand out and show that he is better than others,” Moura wrote in a Facebook post in Portuguese.
“Claudio’s attitude was unpleasant,” he continued, “arguing with colleagues who were as talented as he was (and who probably weren’t),” he wrote. “They were completely unnecessary fights, which didn’t help the class at all.”
Moura, who teaches at the University of Lisbon, did not respond to messages from CNN. A former classmate, who asked not to be named, confirmed Maura’s Facebook account was authentic.
In an interview with Portuguese newspaper Publico, Moura echoed his impression of Neves Valente as an aggressive classmate.
“He was a confrontational figure in class. In other words, other good students would interfere, ask questions, [but] Claudio liked to say he knew,” Mora told the paper.
Another classmate, Nuno Morais, told Público that Neves Valente and Loureiro were among the school’s top students — but they had very different personalities.
“Claudio was one of the students who got the best grades in the course. He was very theoretical,” Morais told the paper. “Nuno was also a good student, he didn’t stand out in terms of grades, but he was a very relaxed person — and seemed to have a knack for slightly more applied subjects.”
After graduating in Portugal, Neves Valente enrolled as a graduate student in physics at Brown University in 2000 but did not finish the program. Maura said he was in contact with Neves Valente at the time and found him fighting with other students again.
“I exchanged several emails with him at the time and saw that he had the same attitude – as he told me – of maintaining unnecessary fights with PhD colleagues in class, whom he considered far less competent than him,” Moura wrote on Facebook. “I could tell he wasn’t having fun at Brown University.”
Brown’s classmate Scott Watson said Valente was “socially awkward” and became his only friend at university. He struggled in America, complaining bitterly that the classes weren’t challenging and that the food was bad, Watson recalled.
“He would say the classes were too easy — honestly, for him they were. He already knew a lot of the material and was really impressive,” Watson, now a professor at Syracuse University, said in a statement shared with CNN.
Watson said Valente could be “kind and gentle” but he was also volatile.
“He was often frustrated — sometimes angry — about the courses, the professors and the living conditions,” Watson said, recalling a fight he once had between Valente and another classmate he often insulted.
Maura said he tried to convince Valente to stay in the graduate program, but he dropped out after a year.
“Claudio thought none of it was worth it, that it was a waste of time and that everyone else was incompetent,” he said on Facebook.
On an archived Brown website, Neves Valente appears to write to classmates that he has “permanently” left the school. The note, first reported by the New York Times, included an email address to reach him and a cryptic note: “The best liar is the one who can make a fool of himself. They’re everywhere, but sometimes they pop up in the most unexpected places.”
A directory of physics graduate students at Brown at the time links to a website with a student email address for Neves Valente. The directory shows that he was assigned to room 122 in the Barus & Holley Engineering Building. Neves Valente opened fire in Room 166 of the same building last week, police said.
What Neves Valente did in the intervening years is unclear. Moura wrote on Facebook that he had heard he had returned to Portugal to work for an internet provider. He got a visa and returned to the US in 2017, although it is unclear what he did for work, police said.
His last known address was Miami, police said.
His former classmates are left trying to understand what could have motivated the brutal violence.
“I never thought he would be able to do something like this,” Mora wrote.
CNN’s Vasco Cotovio, Thomas Bordo, Julia Vargas Jones contributed to this report.
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