Brown campus shooter harbored resentment from time as a PhD student in the early 2000s, friend says

A visitor paused at the memorial at the Van Wickle Gates at Brown University.Craig F. Walker/Globe Staff

Growing up in Portugal, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente stood out for his intellectual potential. In high school, he traveled to national and international physics competitions. He later graduated from Portugal’s top university for science and engineering.

But when he moved to the United States in 2000 to pursue a doctorate in physics at Brown University, his colleagues experienced an ill-tempered young man who felt that even an American Ivy League college was no match for his own intellect. Neves Valente complained the classes were too easy and left the school months after enrolling, apparently with hard feelings.

“He could be kind and gentle, though he often became frustrated — sometimes angry — about courses, professors, and living conditions,” said Scott Watson, a Syracuse University physics professor who befriended Neves Valente at Brown.

After authorities linked him to the mass shooting on Brown’s campus and the killing of an MIT professor earlier this week, Neves Valente, 48, was found dead by suicide Thursday night. In the immediate aftermath, a fuller picture of the suspect emerged: of a brilliant student whose academic promise seemed to dissipate abruptly, an angry genius with long-simmering resentment, a loner who painstakingly planned and executed extraordinary violence.

His death ended a frantic manhunt that began following the Brown shooting Saturday afternoon, according to police. He entered a storage unit in southern New Hampshire about an hour after shooting the MIT professor Monday night, officials said; based on an autopsy, authorities believe he died on Tuesday from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Investigators later seized an arsenal of weapons, ammunition, and body armor during a search of the storage facility, US Attorney Leah B. Foley said Friday. They found two 9mm Glocks purchased in Florida, along with a receipt from a shooting range in New Hampshire, she said.

“I think he was ready for a fight,” Foley said. “Whether he intended to continue on a killing spree and changed his mind, or whether he believed he was going to be in a shootout with law enforcement, it’s speculation.”

But, she said, either scenario was plausible.

Investigators are still trying to determine what motivated his homicidal rampage after he seemingly abandoned the ambitions of his youth, what pushed him to finally act upon old grudges.

What’s clear is that he took careful steps to hide his identity and evade detection both before and after the shootings. Authorities believe he acted alone. They said he had been canvassing Brown’s campus for weeks, targeting a building where he spent significant time as a student in the early 2000s.

Two were killed and nine others injured when Neves Valente opened fire inside Brown’s Barus & Holley engineering building, officials said. Two days later, acclaimed MIT physicist Nuno F.G. Loureiro was shot to death at his Brookline home.

Both natives of Portugal, Neves Valente and Loureiro attended university together in Lisbon, authorities said. They graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico, a premier science institution that’s part of the University of Lisbon. Loureiro went on to pursue a lauded career as a professor and fusion researcher, with stops at Princeton University and in Europe; he joined MIT in 2016. Colleagues from across the world overwhelmingly praised his accomplishments and character, but none reported knowing Neves Valente.

It’s unknown whether the two men had any contact in recent years.

Neves Valente was born in Torres Novas, a city of 35,000 about 75 miles from Lisbon. He attended a public high school, Escola Secondária de Maria Lamas, where he distinguished himself as a bright physics student. In 1994, he participated in a national physics olympiad in Portugal. Based on his performance there, he landed one of five spots for Portuguese students attending an international competition in Australia the following year, according to a Portuguese physics magazine.

After university, he arrived in the US in August 2000 as an F-1 student at Brown; he subsequently obtained lawful permanent residency in April 2017, according to law enforcement officials.

Brown officials said he was admitted as a PhD student in physics and attended the university from fall 2000 to spring 2001, when he took a leave of absence. He formally withdrew in 2003, and had no affiliation with the school since.

In an email to students and staff Friday, university president Christina Paxson said no current Brown employees could recall Neves Valente.

But Watson, his former classmate, said the two became friends despite Neves Valente’s standoffish nature.

“During orientation he was sitting alone, and I walked up and said hello. He was terse at first, but we eventually broke the ice and became close,” Watson told the Globe in an e-mail Friday, describing himself as essentially Neves Valente’s only friend at the university.

Neves Valente was a brilliant student, but he could be frustrated by the curriculum at Brown, which he found underwhelming, Watson said.

“He was by far the best graduate student in our class. Through our conversations, he was already ready to graduate when he arrived,” Watson said. “I don’t like the word genius, but he was.”

He said Neves Valente often griped about daily life in the US, including the food on campus, especially the lack of high-quality fish. The two would get dinner at a local Portuguese restaurant. They’d talk physics, but the conversations always ended in Neves Valente venting, Watson recalled.

During their last interaction, Neves Valente said he had decided to leave Brown because there was nothing left to learn from the courses. Watson said he tried to convince his friend to stay.

“He refused, and that was the last time I heard from him,” said Watson, who was shocked and saddened by news of the shooting.

After that, Neves Valente became increasingly isolated. Authorities said his last known address was in Miami, but it’s not clear how long he’d lived there and whether he was working in any field related to physics. While bits and pieces of his life have come to light, the overarching narrative remains spotty.

An online message from 25 years ago suggests Neves Valente harbored some bitterness even after leaving Brown.

“OK! I am back home and dropped Brown’s Physics Ph.D. program permanently,” reads the message, which was written in Portuguese on Neves Valente’s student directory page on the university physics department website, according to an online archive. The message included an email address where he could be reached and weather forecasts for Lisbon and Providence.

“And the moral of the story is: the best liar is the one who manages to deceive himself,” the message continues in Portuguese. “These people exist everywhere, but sometimes they proliferate in the most unexpected places.”

The page also references “All your base are belong to us,” an internet meme from a 1989 Japanese arcade shooter game called Zero Wing. The game’s objective is to overthrow an alien organization and liberate the galaxy.

Kamran Diba, an associate professor at the University of Michigan Medical School, said he and Neves Valente overlapped at Brown for one year. It was a long time ago, but Diba said his impression was that Neves Valente wasn’t particularly friendly.

“Many of his classmates were interested in chatting with more senior graduate students, but I don’t recall him being that way,” Diba said in an e-mail.

He said the scene of the mass shooting “was a place for me of many great friendships.”

“It’s sad and upsetting the hate this person kept for so many years,” he added.

It was a familiar story to James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who studies mass shootings. Such is the case with many college campus shooters over the years, he said: A promising young student excels in school, then enrolls in a rigorous graduate program. Suddenly, perhaps for the first time, they run into struggle.

“People who fail when they feel like they have such promise — that’s hard to take,” Fox said.

Over time, it can build. And eventually a desire for retribution boils over, he said.

“Mass shooters tend to see themselves as victims — victims of injustice,” Fox said.

“They want to punish people who they hold responsible for their misery.”

Retired FBI special agent Kenneth Gray, now a criminology professor at the University of New Haven, said he’s interested in learning more about Neves Valente’s recent past — and whether he wrote down any motive. But details surrounding the Brown shooting suggest old wounds.

“Now we know he wasn’t targeting any one specific person,” Gray said. “He was targeting demons from his own past.”

Steph Machado of the Globe staff contributed to this report