The Brown University and MIT professor shooter whined that the Ivy League school’s food was lousy and its classes were too easy, it surfaced Friday – along with new details about his academic competition with the teacher he killed.
Claudio Neves Valente, a 48-year-old Portuguese national, was miserable on Brown’s leafy Rhode Island campus and had a laundry list of complaints while briefly enrolled as a physics grad student there than 25 years ago, a former pal and classmate told The Post.
Claudio Neves Valente was behind the shooting at Brown and at an MIT professor’s home. Providence Police Department/AFP via Getty Images
“I remember him getting irritated about the quality of food on campus, especially the lack of high-quality fish,’’ Scott Watson said of Neves Valente — who fatally shot two Brown students and wounded nine others during a rampage at a study hall last week.
“He often complained about moving to the United States and about the university,’’ recalled Watson, now a Syracuse University physics professor, of the mass shooter, who ended up killing himself Thursday night as cops closed in.
“He would say the classes were too easy — honestly, for him they were,” Watson said.
“He already knew most of the material and was genuinely impressive.”
But while Neves Valente was sometimes brilliant and could be “kind and gentle,” he also had a dark side — including when he bullied another classmate and called him “his slave” because he was from Brazil,’’ the ex-friend said.
“I had to break up a fight once” between them, Watson said.
Claudio Neves Valente on an Instituto Superior Técnico in Lisbon alumni page.
Neves Valente stopped communicating with his well-to-do family in Portugal shortly after his stint at Brown, kin told the New York Times.
His “devastated” parents hadn’t heard from him for two decades — only seeing him again when his picture appeared in the media after he killed himself Thursday night as the cops closed in, the outlet said.
“His mother said this morning that she had always worried that the next time she would hear about him, he would be dead,” Mirita Domingues, a relative, told the Times.
Neves Valente’s last known address was a two-bedroom condo in a gleaming waterfront high-rise in Miami, Fla., worth at least $900,000, according to records and law-enforcement sources.
The murderer grew up outside of Lisbon and was a happy-go-lucky kid, Domingues said.
In 1995, the gifted student even went to Australia as a member of his country’s four-person prestigious International Physics Olympiad team, where he was the smartest in his group, although it did not end up near the top of the competition, the outlet said.
That same year, Neves Valente enrolled in the same physics program as his victim at MIT, Nuno Loureiro, at the highly regarded Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal between 1995 and 2005, a rep for the school told the Times.
Both were at the top of their class, although Neves Valente had higher marks, the outlet said.
Here’s the latest on the mass shooting at Brown University
Neves Valente was a teaching assistant at the school at some point but was terminated by the institution’s president, João Hipólito, on Feb. 29, 2000, according to CNN Portugal. The reason was not immediately clear.
Loureiro remained at the school and became a researcher and then a team leader at its Institute for Plasmas and Nuclear Fusion, the Times reported.
Claudio Neves Valente via REUTERS
The school called him a “brilliant colleague, with whom it was a scientific and personal pleasure to collaborate.”
Neves Valente meanwhile wasn’t remembered by those there at the time, the outlet noted.
The killer shot dead Loureiro at his home in Massachusetts two days after he riddled the Brown classroom with bullets.
After Neves Valente left the Portugal school, he moved to the US and enrolled in Brown before soon dropping out.
The shooting has rocked the school community. Matthew Healey/UPI/Shutterstock
Another former classmate of Neves Valente, Luk Chong Yeung, recalled to the Times that he struggled academically at Brown and was introverted.
While she noted neither of those things were unusual for the program, she said Neves Valente “was just a little bit more removed.”
She and the shooter socialized as part of a Portuguese-speaking student group and said the building where Neves Valente carried out his rampage, Barus and Holley, was akin to a “second home” for physics graduates students.
Watson, who said he was essentially Neves Valente’s only friend at Brown, explained Friday that he tried to convince then-pal to stay at “the Happy Ivy.”
“He refused, and that was the last time I heard from him,” he said.
“He told me he was returning to Portugal, though it now appears that may not have been the case.”
-Additional reporting by Joe Marino in NYC and Georgett Roberts in Providence, RI
