By Andrei Khalip

LISBON, Dec 20 (Reuters) – The man who police say killed two Brown University students and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist had cut short a promising academic career to take a modest software developer job back in his native Portugal before returning to the United States in 2017.

U.S. investigators, helped by their Portuguese colleagues, are still seeking a motive for the shootings carried out by Claudio Valente before his suicide. Officials have been looking into his academic past, which some of Valente’s former colleagues recall as an uneasy one.

According to physicist Filipe Moura, who was Valente’s teaching assistant at Lisbon’s elite Instituto Superior Tecnico (IST) in 1996-97 and maintained contact with him through the early 2000s, Valente did not enjoy his time at Brown and left after about a year in 2001. 

“Claudio thought none of it was worthwhile, that it was a waste of time, and that everyone else was incompetent,” he wrote, adding that Valente then took a job as an IT specialist for Portuguese internet portal Sapo.

In a series of Facebook posts, Moura remembered Valente as “the best student of his year” at IST, but also someone who had “a very strong need to stand out and show that he was better than the others”, which often made teaching him an unpleasant experience because of his squabbles with other students. 

Several ex-students disputed that characterization, however, saying that while Valente could be arrogant at times, he conducted himself much like other brilliant students and did not exhibit any antisocial behavior.

A former colleague at Sapo, cited by the newspaper Diario de Noticias, described Valente as “a very good person, truly sweet,” with a great sense of humor and patience to explain things, but extremely reserved about his life away from work. 

“He was a little weird… a bit out of place as a software developer” considering his academic background in physics, she said, adding that Valente at one point left the company but then returned for another stint before going to the United States.

Valente won the U.S. green card lottery and became a lawful permanent resident in 2017.    

The only child in a middle-class family from the town of Entroncamento near Lisbon, he had severed all relationships with his parents around the time of his studies at Brown, according to local media. 

Investigators believe that two days after the Brown shooting, Valente shot Nuno Loureiro, an MIT physics professor and his classmate at the IST.

“I never thought I’d live to see this tragic drama unfold, especially involving the physics students from IST who, despite everything, seemed more like children in adult bodies during moments of ego insecurity,” researcher Hugo Tercas wrote commenting on Moura’s post.

(Reporting by Andrei Khalip; Editing by Sergio Non and Nick Zieminski)

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