The crazed gunman who killed two students and wounded nine others at Brown University before murdering a top MIT professor went back to Portugal for close to two decades after dropping out of the school’s PhD physics program, The Post has learned.
There, Claudio Neves Valente worked as a web developer for an internet company, where colleagues called him brilliant but antisocial.
“He was absolutely brilliant, of outstanding intelligence,” a coworker at SAPO, a Portuguese web portal company, who asked not to be named, told the Diario de Noticias.
“He was very reserved… We didn’t know anything about him, if even his parents were alive, where they lived or where he lived, if he lived with someone.”
“He did not go for drinks with us, did not go to our houses. No one was friends with him outside of work,” she said.
Neves Valente abruptly quit SAPO in 2017, the colleague told the outlet. That was the year he won the green card lottery to come back to the US, authorities have said, this time living in Miami.
“He said, ‘I’m not coming in tomorrow,’ and that was it,” said the coworker, adding that was when they lost touch with him.
Little is known about Valente’s activities between 2017 and Dec. 1 — when he flew to Boston.
He kept an extremely low profile, authorities said, maintaining no online presence, and by all accounts wasn’t involved in the field of physics.
Meanwhile, his former classmate from his undergraduate physics days, slain MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, was hitting the peak of his career.
Earlier this year, Nuno Loureiro was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers, described by the White House as “the highest honor bestowed by the US government on outstanding scientists and engineers early in their careers.”
“Everything points to a long-standing rancor,” Bruno Soares Gonçalves, a Portuguese plasma researcher who knew Loureiro, told SIC Noticias.
When the pair studied together, Valente was the better performing out of the two.
He maintained a 19-point average out 20 — the equivalent of a 4.0 GPA.
“Most colleagues have no memory of the student Cláudio Valente, except for the fact that he was the best student in the course that year,” Rogério Colaço, president of the Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon, told Portugal’s Diario de Noticias.
“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,” Filipe Moura, who was three years ahead of Valente said on Facebook.
Moura, who served as Valente’s monitor in Math Analysis III when the now infamous-mass shooter was in his second year, said they kept in touch through Valente’s brief but tumultuous time at the Providence school.
“He maintained unnecessary conflicts with PhD colleagues in class, which he again considered far less capable than he was,” Moura said. “I could tell that he wasn’t enjoying being at Brown University, but I tried to convince him…. that the PhD was a great opportunity that he shouldn’t waste,” he added.
“Claudio thought none of it was worth it, that it was a waste of time and the others were all incapable,” said Moura.
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