Claudio Neves Valente: Neighbors in Lisbon recall Brown University attack suspect as quiet, reclusive student
Lisbon
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Former neighbors paint a mixed portrait of Claudio Neves Valente, whose motives remain a mystery more than a week after police say he killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor, portraying a “very bright” but reclusive young man who was estranged from his family and whose mother once told a neighbor that her son “needs help.”
CNN visited the apartment building that Neves Valente, a native of Portugal, lived in as a student more than two decades ago before moving to the United States. The brown, cream and gray high-rise in Olivais, a modest middle-class neighborhood in eastern Lisbon, looks much like others in the area.
People who knew him there said they remain in shock after US authorities identified Neves Valente as the gunman who shot 11 people at Rhode Island’s Brown University, two of them fatally, on December 13 and mortally wounded a former Portuguese classmate, MIT 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 storage facility he rented in New Hampshire.
Residents of his Lisbon neighborhood told CNN the former Ivy League student was extremely smart and polite, but reclusive. At the time he lived there, he was studying at the Instituto Superior Técnico, one of Portugal’s most prestigious engineering schools.
The institute confirmed to CNN that Neves Valente and Loureiro were both students there between 1995 and 2000, and that Neves Valente studied for a degree in technological physics engineering.
Maria Margarida Baptista, a neighbor, recalled working with Neves Valente on administrative tasks for the apartment building, duties assigned to residents for up to three years on a rotating basis. “He was always very diligent” with the math and bills, she told CNN. “Everything in the administration was always very well done.” He would always greet her and address her by name, she added. “I really liked him.”
Despite not having seen him for more than 25 years, she said she was stunned by the news of the attack at Brown. “I was in shock,” 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 bit strange,” Baptista said, “but he was a very bright boy.”
Neighbors say Neves Valente’s reclusiveness extended beyond the community. According to residents, he also avoided contact with his immediate family. His parents would come to visit his apartment, ring the bell, and he wouldn’t open the front door, a woman living nearby who declined to give her name told CNN.
Neves Valente’s parents would sometimes hide and wait outside the building, hoping to speak with Neves Valente, the woman said.
“He changed the locks. He knew they were around. He wouldn’t leave the house – it was like he was hiding from them.” She said Neves Valente’s mother often relied on her for information.
The woman said simply confirming she had seen Neves Valente would bring his mother relief. “She would relax because she knew he was alive,” the neighbor recalled. “All they wanted was to spend time with him, but they never got to see him. He didn’t want to see his parents.”
Baptista recalled one occasion when the mother, for unknown reasons, feared that something bad had happened to Neves Valente inside the apartment. “The parents came with firefighters and police to break through the windows to check if he was dead,” she said.
They were eventually able to get inside, but he was not home. Neighbors said Neves Valente was extremely upset when he learned his parents had involved the police.
The neighbor who declined to be identified recalled a separate occasion when police were called again but did not force entry, stating that Neves Valente was not a minor.
Later, the mother confided that she feared her son would sell the apartment and disappear – which eventually happened. “That, for the parents, was devastating,” the neighbor said. “That was the last day his mother came here.”
The neighbor, who said she remains in contact with Neves Valente’s parents, said they had not spoken to their son in years. “The parents … are very gentle people,” she said. “They are doing really badly. Neighbors have been helping them. They are quite old, and the news was devastating.”
At one point, she recalled, the mother confided without elaborating: “My son needs help, but he doesn’t want to get it.”
His parents had fostered Neves Valente’s passion for science before he attended university.
While he was in secondary school some 30 years ago, they persuaded a physics and chemistry teacher, José Morgado, to take their son to Portugal’s physics Olympics in Coimbra, a city about 120 miles north of Lisbon.
“He wanted to go. And because there wasn’t anyone who would make themselves available to guide him, (his parents) called me to help him, and that’s what I did,” Morgado said.
Speaking to CNN from Torres Nova, near Neves Valente’s hometown of Entroncamento in central Portugal, Morgado described the former student as brilliant and exceptional, adding that he ended up winning the national event and went on to compete in the international physics Olympics in Australia.
“I used to say to my colleagues that Claudio was the ‘perfect student.’ During the time I had him as a student, he never deviated from that pattern,” Morgado recalled. “An excellent person with his teachers, his classmates and everyone he interacted with. I never met anyone who said Claudio behaved poorly or wasn’t a good student. In every subject, he performed well.”
Like others who knew Neves Valente in Portugal, Morgado said he was shocked to learn about the shootings at Brown University and Massachusetts.
“It was the complete opposite of the image I had of him. Something happened to him that led him to take those actions,” he told CNN. “But him being the perpetrator is something that I just can’t wrap my head around, given the image I have of him. I still think of him as an 18-year-old.”
