Classmate: Shooting Suspect Had 'Great Need to Stand Out'

Former classmates of a shooting suspect and one of his victims say they're struggling to understand what led to dual tragedies in the US—and one thinks an overly demanding academic environment years ago played a role. Claudio Neves Valente is the suspect in a mass shooting at Brown University and in another shooting that killed MIT physics professor Nuno FG Loureiro. The men studied together at the University of Lisbon's elite Tecnico engineering school, graduating in 2000. And while both graduated near the top of their class, only Loureiro went on to a successful academic career. Classmate Nuno Morais tells the Guardian he believes the pressures of academia and Valente's stalled career may have fed a serious mental health crisis.

"I don't remember any specific situations directly involving Nuno and Claudio during our graduate degree, but the culture in these schools remains the same—a hyper-competitive environment where students who struggle are humiliated and made to feel they can only succeed if they are the best of the best," he says. Another classmate, Felipe Moura, suggests that Neves Valente may have been one of the humiliators rather than one of the victims: "Claudio was obviously one of the best, but in class he had a great need to stand out and show that he was better than the rest," per CNN. He added that Neves Valente had an "unpleasant" attitude and would argue with those "he didn't consider as brilliant as him (and who probably weren't)."

Neves Valente briefly enrolled in a PhD program at Brown in 2000 but left within months, returning to Portugal to work as a programmer. A former Brown classmate, Scott Watson, described him as "socially awkward" and sometimes volatile. Morais described that failed doctorate as a crushing blow to someone who had aspired to a career on par with Loureiro's. He also criticized what he called a normalized culture of emotional distress and unchecked bullying in parts of academia, saying Portugal trails US institutions like MIT and Caltech in addressing student mental health. Tecnico, for its part, says it sees no evidence linking the shooting to events at the school decades ago but plans internal discussions.