Nuno F.G. Loureiro’s wife had just returned to their Brookline home from a dance class, and he was keeping her company as she ate in the kitchen. In the living room, two of their three daughters played cards.
Around 8:30 p.m. on Dec. 15, the doorbell rang several times, and the couple’s 12-year-old daughter opened the door to look out. There, she later told police, was a man holding a package. The family hadn’t been expecting anyone, so Loureiro told his daughter he would see who it was. He walked out into the building’s foyer.
The family’s wholesome night shattered at the sound of gunshots.
That’s according to newly released police reports about one portion of the bizarre and deadly rampage of Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who killed three people including Loureiro and wounded nine more in shootings at Brown University and then outside the Loureiro family’s condo.
The 96 pages of reports from the Brookline Police Department, first reported by the Boston Herald, provide some new details about Loureiro’s death and the subsequent investigation into a seemingly inexplicable crime. They also reinforce what many have said publicly about him: that the renowned physicist was beloved by family and friends and held in high esteem by colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology physics lab he ran.
One woman who knew him in a professional capacity later told police that he was widely seen as “a good father and husband.”
He was a quiet man, she said, a good mentor; students loved him. Multiple people interviewed by police said much the same.
According to the Brookline police reports about Loureiro’s death, the department received multiple calls for a man shot, including one from a young woman saying the victim was her father. Officers found Loureiro clinging to life, struck at least three times by bullets, including in the chest, abdomen, and thigh. Authorities sought to stop the bleeding and took him to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead.
His daughter who’d seen the man with the package told police she’d run back outside at the sound of gunshots. She saw the man, clad in a yellow reflective vest, running to a car and then driving away, she told police.
The Brookline police reports show the difficulties of trying to solve a crime with no clear motive. They found footage of the man walking and the car leaving the area. They talked to his family, who said they had no idea why anyone would want to kill him. And then in the following days, officers spoke to people who knew Loureiro through his work running MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, but got few answers that suggested anything abnormal.
Did any of the 250-plus lab staff have a problem with him? It didn’t seem like it. Was there any evidence he’d been having an affair? Not at all. Any former employees or students with animosity toward him? A couple of people at the school floated the names of students who had been angry with the program generally over the years, but there wasn’t much information available.
Authorities now know that the investigators’ questions about angry grad students were on the right track, but in the wrong place.
Loureiro’s killer had gone to college with him decades ago in their native Portugal. Authorities have not publicly stated a motive, but interviews with friends and family of the shooter, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, show a man who’s harbored grievances for decades against a world that, in his mind, never appropriately lauded his talents. Among the slights he perceived, it seems, was how he washed out of a PhD program at Brown University nearly two decades ago and never became the transcendent physicist he’d envisioned — yet his old associate, Loureiro, despite his views of him being a middling student at their prestigious college, did.
Neves Valente carried out a shooting spree starting Dec. 13, according to authorities. That Saturday evening, he attacked a building that houses the physics department at Brown, shooting 11 people who were attending an economics study session. The shooting killed Ella Cook, a 19-year-old sophomore, and MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, an 18-year-old freshman.
He quickly left Providence without being caught, and, three days later, killed Loureiro. Again, he left without being captured.
At first, even as questions swirled during the frantic manhunt that followed the Brown attack, authorities said they did not see a connection between the killings.
But investigators eventually found someone who gave them a partial license plate of the Brown shooter’s car, leading them to track down the Nissan that Neves Valente had driven from Providence to Brookline, and then across the border north to New Hampshire. There, he’d hunkered down in a storage unit he’d been renting.
He recorded a rambling video and, before police arrived, shot himself to death.
Marcela Rodrigues of the Globe staff contributed.
Sean Cotter can be reached at sean.cotter@globe.com. Follow him @cotterreporter.