Decades before he was a suspected mass murderer, Claudio Neves Valente was an Ivy League bully who called one of his classmates his “slave.”
An old friend made the chilling revelation, telling the Independent that Valente was also a serial complainer who griped about moving to the United States and the lack of quality fish to eat at Brown University, where they were both Ph.D. candidates.
Most concerning, however, was how Valente treated one of his classmates.
“Claudio would insult and call him his slave,” said Scott Watson, who is now a physics professor at Syracuse University. “I had to break up a fight once.”
Watson said that the classmate was Brazilian. Valente is from Portugal, which is the South American nation’s one-time colonizer.
That was in the early 2000s, before Valente abruptly dropped out of Brown.
Valente returned to the university on Saturday and allegedly opened fire on students, killing two and injuring nine others. The following day, authorities believe he murdered the acclaimed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro, also of Portugal, at his condo near Boston.
Authorities have said nothing of a potential motive in either incident.
Valente, 48, died by suicide at a rented storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire. His body was discovered on Thursday.
The killer did not have a significant online presence. He obtained lawful permanent residency in the United States in 2017 through the Diversity Visa Lottery program, which the Trump administration has paused in the wake of the trio of killings.
It is unknown what Valente did for work in the United States. His last listed address, a house in Miami, Florida, had a monthly rent of $4,850 as of April. Records indicate that he also resided in Las Vegas at one point.
Watson told the Independent that he was “essentially” Valente’s only friend at Brown. The killer has been described as being ahead of his classmates academically and was annoyed with how easy courses were at the university, so he left.
“He often complained about moving to the United States and about the university,” Watson said. “He would say the classes were too easy—honestly, for him they were. He already knew most of the material and was genuinely impressive. I remember him getting irritated about the quality of food on campus, especially the lack of high-quality fish.”
That description tracks with the few other stories that have emerged about Valente.
A former classmate of Valente’s at Portugal’s Instituto Superior Técnico, where the slain MIT professor also studied alongside him, recalled on Facebook that Valente was cocky and felt he was better than his classmates.
“I could tell that he wasn’t enjoying being at Brown University, but I tried to convince him that that would be an early stage, a culture shock, but that that Ph.D. was a great opportunity that he shouldn’t waste,” Filipe Moura posted in Portuguese on Friday.
He continued, “That didn’t work out. Claudio thought none of it was worth it, which was a waste of time, and the others were all incapable. He dropped out of his Ph.D. at the end of one year. That was the last news I heard from him.”
Moura also alleged that Valente was a crummy colleague.
“In class, he had a great need to stand out and show that he was better than the rest,” Moura wrote. “At first he liked to teach good students, but Claudio’s attitude was unpleasant, often engaging in quizzes with colleagues he didn’t consider as brilliant as him... They were totally unnecessary quirks, which did not help the class at all.”
Watson said he also tried to convince the “socially awkward” Valente to stay and finish the program at Brown, but he refused.
“The last time I spoke with him, we walked to his apartment, and I tried to convince him not to leave,” Watson said. “He refused, and that was the last time I heard from him. He told me he was returning to Portugal.”
