As investigators work to find a motive behind the mass shooting at Brown University and the killing of a popular MIT professor, former classmates of the accused killer described him as a brilliant but exceptionally difficult student.
Claudio Neves Valente, the 48-year-old suspect who police say was found dead Thursday of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, was a top student but a disruptive figure in his native Portugal, classmates recalled Friday.
Neves Valente studied at the Instituto Superior Técnico with Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor he is now accused of shooting. The school confirmed to CNN that both men were students there between 1995 and 2000 and that Neves Valente was studying for a degree in Engineering Physics Technology.
That engineering class was full of talented students, classmate Felipe Moura recalled — but Neves Valente stood out, for good and bad reasons.
“Claudio was obviously one of the best, but in class he had a great need to stand out and show that he was better than the rest,” Moura wrote in Portuguese in a Facebook post.
“Claudio’s attitude was unpleasant,” he continued, often arguing with “colleagues he didn’t think were as bright as him (and who probably weren’t),” he wrote. “It was totally pointless arguing that didn’t help the class at all.”
Moura, who now teaches at a university in Lisbon, did not respond to CNN’s messages. A former classmate, who asked not to be named, confirmed that Moura’s Facebook account is genuine.
In an interview with Público, a Portuguese newspaper, Moura echoed his impressions of Neves Valente as an aggressive classmate.
“He had a confrontational personality in class. In other words, the other good students would intervene, ask questions, [but] Claudio liked to say he was the one who knew,” Moura told the paper.
Nuno Morais, another classmate, told Público that Neves Valente and Loureiro were among the school’s top students – but their personalities were completely different.
“Claudio was one of the students with the best grades in the course. He was much more theoretical,” Morais told the newspaper. “Nuno was also a good student, he stood out less in terms of grades, but was a more relaxed person – and seemed to have a knack for slightly more applied subjects.”
After graduating in Portugal, Neves Valente enrolled at Brown University in 2000 as a graduate student in physics, but did not complete the program. Moura said he stayed in touch with Neves Valente during that time and found he was clashing with other students again.
“I exchanged many emails with him at that time and saw that he maintained the same attitude – as he told me – of maintaining unnecessary conflicts with fellow PhD students in the class, whom he again considered far less capable than him,” Moura wrote on Facebook. “I could tell he didn’t like being at Brown University.”
Scott Watson, a classmate at Brown, said Valente was “socially awkward” and became his only friend at the university. He struggled in the U.S., complaining bitterly that the classes weren’t challenging and the food was poor, Watson recalled.
“He would say the classes were too easy — honestly, for him they were. He already knew most of the material and it was really impressive,” Watson, who is now a professor at Syracuse University, said in a statement to CNN.
Watson said Valente could be “kind and gentle” but that he was also volatile.
“He often became frustrated — sometimes angry — about classes, teachers and living conditions,” Watson said, recalling that once he had to break up a fight between Valente and another classmate, he often insulted him.
Moura said he tried to convince Valente to stay with the graduate program, but he left after a year.
“Claudio thought nothing was worth it, which was a waste of time, and the others were all incapable,” he said on Facebook.
In an archived Brown website, Neves Valente appears to write to classmates that he has left the school “permanently.” The note, first reported by the New York Times, includes an email address to reach him and a cryptic note: “The best liar is the one who is able to fool himself. They are everywhere, but sometimes they proliferate in the most unexpected places.”
A director of physics graduate students at Brown at the time links to the website along with a student email address for Neves Valente. The manager says he was assigned to room 122 in the Barus and Holley engineering building. Neves Valente carried out his shooting in room 166 of the same building last week, police said.
It is not clear what Neves Valente has done in the intervening years. Moura wrote on Facebook that he learned he had returned to Portugal to work for an internet provider; police say he got a visa and returned to the US in 2017, though it’s unclear what he did for work.
His last known address was in Miami, police said.
His former classmates were left to try to understand what could have motivated the brutal violence.
“I never expected him to be capable of such a thing,” Moura wrote.
CNN’s Vasco Cotovio, Thomas Bordeaux, Julia Vargas Jones contributed to this report.
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