lisbon
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Former neighbors have painted an intricate portrait of Claudio Neves Valente. More than a week after police say they killed two Brown University students and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, the motive remains a mystery. The film depicts a “very bright” but reclusive young man estranged from his family, whose mother once told neighbors that her son “needs help.”
CNN visited the apartment where Neves Valente, a native of Portugal, lived as a student more than 20 years ago before immigrating to the United States. The brown, cream, and gray skyscrapers in Olivais, a modest middle-class neighborhood in eastern Lisbon, are similar to other skyscrapers in the area.
Those who knew him there said they were still in shock after U.S. authorities identified Neves Valente as the gunman who shot 11 people, two of them fatally, at Brown University in Rhode Island on Dec. 13 and fatally wounded his former Portuguese classmate and Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro two days later in Brookline, Massachusetts. On Thursday night, police found Neves Valente, 48, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a rented storage facility in New Hampshire.
Neighbors in Lisbon told CNN that the former Ivy League student was very intelligent and polite, but reclusive. At the time he lived there, he studied at the Institute of Advanced Technology, one of Portugal’s most prestigious engineering schools.
The institute confirmed to CNN that Neves-Valente and Loureiro were students at the university from 1995 to 2000, with Neves-Valente studying for a degree in technical and physical engineering.
Neighbor María Margarida Baptista recalls working with Neves Valente on apartment maintenance tasks, which were assigned to residents on a rotating basis for up to three years. “He was always very hardworking,” she told CNN. “Everything in the administration was always very well done,” she added, adding that he always greeted her and addressed her by name. “I really liked him.”
Even though she hadn’t seen him in more than 25 years, she said she was stunned to hear the news of the attack at Brown. “I was shocked,” she said. “I didn’t even recognize him on TV…I remember him as a boy, a student, a teenager. A very responsible teenager.”
“He was a little weird,” Baptista said. “But he was a very intelligent boy.”
Neves Valente’s reclusive lifestyle extended beyond the local community, neighbors said. According to residents, he also avoided contact with his immediate family. When his parents came to his apartment and rang the bell, he wouldn’t open the front door, a woman who lives nearby, who declined to give her name, told CNN.
Neves-Valente’s parents sometimes hid outside the building and waited, hoping to talk to Neves-Valente, the woman said.
“He changed the locks. He knew they were nearby. He wouldn’t leave the house. It was like he was hiding from them.” Neves Valente’s mother often turned to her for information, she said.
The woman said her mother would be reassured just by confirming that she had met Neves Valente. “She was relaxed because she knew he was alive,” the neighbor recalled. “All they wanted was to spend time with him, but they couldn’t see him. He didn’t want to see his parents.”
Baptista recalled a time when her mother became worried, for unknown reasons, that something bad had happened to Neves-Valente inside the apartment. “The parents came with firefighters and police and broke through the window to find their son dead,” she said.
Eventually they were able to get inside, but he was not home. Neves Valente was extremely upset when she learned her parents had been involved with the police, neighbors said.
The neighbor, who declined to be named, recalled another incident in which the police were called again but Neves-Valente was not a minor and did not force entry.
Later, the mother confessed that she was worried that her son would sell the apartment and disappear, but that’s what happened in the end. “It was devastating for the parents,” the neighbor said. “That was the last day his mother was here.”
Neves-Valente’s neighbors said they are still in contact with their parents, who said they had not spoken to their son in years. “My parents… are very kind people,” she said. “Their situation is really dire. Their neighbors are helping them. They are quite elderly and the news was devastating.”
At one point, she recalled, her mother confided, without elaborating. “My son needs help, but he doesn’t want to get it.”
His parents fostered a passion for science even before Neves Valente enrolled in university.
About 30 years ago, when he was in middle school, they persuaded their physics and chemistry teacher, José Morgado, to take their son to the Portuguese Physics Olympiad in Coimbra, a city about 190 miles north of Lisbon.
“He wanted to go, and since there was no one to guide him, (his parents) called me to help him, and I did,” Morgado said.
In an interview with CNN from Neves Valente’s hometown of Torres Nova, near Entroncamento in central Portugal, Morgado said his former student was a brilliant and extraordinary person, adding that he ended up winning a national competition and competing in the International Physics Olympiad in Australia.
“I used to say to my colleagues that Claudio was the ‘perfect student,’ and he never deviated from that pattern while I was developing him as a student,” Morgado recalled. “He was a great person to his teachers, classmates, and everyone he came into contact with. I never met anyone who said Claudio misbehaved or wasn’t a good student. He got good grades in every subject.”
Like others who knew Portugal’s Neves Valente, Morgado said she was shocked to learn of the Brown University and Massachusetts shootings.
“It was the complete opposite of the image I had of him. Something happened to him that made him act the way he did,” he told CNN. “But given the image I have of him, it just never crosses my mind that he’s the perpetrator. I still think of him as 18 years old.”
