Two Young Physicists Seemed Destined for Greatness. Two Decades Later, One Shot the Other Dead.

WSJ ^ | December 19, 2025 | Jared Mitovich, Neil Mehta , Deborah Acosta, Douglas Belkin

[Red Badger]

Claudio Neves Valente, the suspect in the Brown and MIT shootings, had flashes of temper; former classmates describe him as confrontational and socially awkward

Twenty-five years ago, two promising physicists graduated from a prestigious science university in Lisbon. On Monday, one gunned the other down at his home outside Boston after firing on a classroom of Brown University undergrads, authorities say.

Claudio Neves Valente, the suspected shooter, once had a bright future. He graduated at the top of his college class, ahead of classmate Nuno Loureiro. But by the time Neves Valente confronted Loureiro at his Brookline, Mass., apartment building this past week, Loureiro’s career had soared while Neves Valente’s withered.

Loureiro was an acclaimed nuclear scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, leading one of its largest labs. Neves Valente had been living in an unassuming home in Miami, far from the academic grandeur for which he’d once seemed destined.

Investigators don’t know why Neves Valente opened fire in the Brown classroom, nor what drove him to target Loureiro. After a six-day manhunt, police found Neves Valente dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit in New Hampshire Thursday night.

“I don’t think we have any idea why now, or why Brown, why these students, why this classroom. That is really unknown to us,” said Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha at a press briefing.

Neves Valente was born in the Portuguese town of Torres Novas, about 70 miles north of Lisbon. As a teenager, he was selected to represent Portugal at the International Physics Olympiad, according to the Portugal Physics Gazette. The wife of one of his teachers told local media that the teacher considered him his best student.

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TOPICS: Education; Health/Medicine; Science; Society
KEYWORDS: 2convenient; brownuniversity; claudionevesvalente; nevesvalente; nuclearscientists; physics; valente

[gloryblaze]

Has there been any credible information on how the shooter lived in the Miami area? What he did for those 8(?) years?

Neither media nor authorities have released anything yet. He apparently kept a low profile and had no encounters with law enforcement. Information will come out; we need to be cautious of the budding conspiracy fantasies sure to invade the net real soon.

[Reily]

Feynmann was an interesting guy but he also seems to have been a bit of a jerk. There are all sorts of rumors about his time at CalTech regarding his treatment of students and their wives. I’ve heard from several people that if Feynmann wanted to sleep with your wife that was a condition to get through the program. Hear it once you can dismiss, hear it three times from three different people with variations in the tale you scratch your chin and go hmmm.

[hecticskeptic]

What he did for those 8(?) years?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lots of questions and I’m just as curious as to why he went back to Portugal, what did he do there for 14 years (2003 to 2017) and what brought him back to Miami?

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I hadn’t heard any of that, but it is not inconsistent with his character, I suppose. Carl Sagan was a skirt chaser, but not one to resort to extortion.