Cláudio Neves Valente caught by the FBI on video surveillance cameras.
“Everyone remembered Nuno”. As for Cláudio, both of their teachers admit that she had difficulty remembering. Police are still trying to discover what led Cláudio Valente to murder his former colleague, after having committed a massacre at Brown University, where he studied.
Cláudio Valente and Nuno Loureiro were colleagues course at Instituto Superior Técnico (IST), in Lisbon, between 1995 and 2000.
The suspect in the death of physicist Nuno Loureiro later became a monitor at the Institute. However, in February 2000, Técnico terminated the contract it had with Cláudio Valente as monitor, as stated in an order published in March of that year in the Diário da República.
He writes that the physicist’s departure from IST was due to a disciplinary process.
That year, he left for the USA to take a postgraduate degree at the University of Brwon – where 25 years later he would commit an attack. He is suspected of having killed two students in a shooting at that university in the city of Providence.
Cláudio Valente, 48 years old, is also identified by the North American police as suspected of having shot former colleague Nuno Loureiro47 years old, on Monday night, at home, Brookline, also in the Greater Boston Area.
As the president of the institution detailed, Christina Paxsoncited by the AP news agency, the Portuguese was admitted to Bown University for a postgraduate degree in Physics in September 2000, having been enrolled between autumn 2000 and spring 2001. Currently, the suspect did not currently have any affiliation with the university.
Cláudio Valente committed suicide. He was found dead on Thursday in a warehouse in New Hampshire, in that Metropolitan area, with a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The autopsy determined that the criminal he had been dead for two days when the body was found, US authorities said at the end of the day this Friday.
Investigators are still trying to clarify why Neves Valente opened fire on campus decades after abandoning his studies and, later, murdering Loureiro, with whom he studied in Portugal in the 1990s.
Peter Neronhaattorney general of Rhode Island, the state where Brown University is located, stressed today that “there are many unknowns” about the case.
“Cláudio was one of the best… but unpleasant”
Correio da Manhã reveals that Cláudio Valente was the best student in secondary school in Torres Novas. After Técnico, he went to the USA and will have severed relationship with parents. Last known address was in Miami. He was not married and had no children.
Filipe Moura He was a colleague of Cláudio Valente and Nuno Loureiro on the Technological Physics Engineering course at IST. In a Facebook post, he describes the killer as someone “nasty”, who “had a great need to show that he was better than others”.
“Cláudio was obviously one of the bestbut in class he had a great need to stand out”, he describes.
“A sweet man. How is that possible?”
He spoke to former co-workers at Portal SAPO (where Cláudio also worked as a computer scientist), who seemed surprised by the news.
“When I woke up and saw his full name in the news, Cláudio Manuel Neves Valente, I didn’t relate. I only realized it was him because in one of the WhatsApp groups someone said ‘Have you seen Cláudio?’ We were all in shock, the widespread reaction was ‘Fónix, Cláudio? As?’“, said one of these colleagues to DN, without wanting to reveal her name.
The colleague who speaks was a product manager and says that she often asked Cláudio to explain technical things to her: “He was absolutely brilliant, with an extraordinary intelligence, but very friendly and extraordinarily accessible. He was very patient and explained. He was a very good person. Truly sweet. And everyone who spent time with him at Sapo says that, that he was approachable and friendly.”
“It was a little strange. But I always attributed that to the fact that he was so intelligent. It’s that strangeness that a person who plays in a different league to yours gives you and has to make an effort to get down to your level”, he added, giving another perspective.
“Everyone remembered Nuno”
To DN, a Técnico teacher who taught Cláudio Valente and Nuno Loureiro admits having made “a great effort” to remember the murderer, “because he was very passive”. Unlike Nuno Loureiro, who “was always very lively and who everyone remembers”
Born in Viseu, Nuno Loureiro has headed one of the largest laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) since 2024, where he was also a professor.
The IST, as well as the Institute of Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion, a unit of Técnico where Nuno Loureiro led a research group, before joining MIT in 2016, expressed “the deepest respect for the pain of the physicist’s family and friends”, “not commenting on ongoing police investigations and legal matters”.
In Lusa, this Friday, the president of IST, Rogério Colaçosaid, without providing further information, that “Técnico was contacted by US authorities”.
“That’s what we can say,” he said.
