On the morning of Dec. 15, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente pulled a gray Nissan Sentra into a parking spot on Babcock Street and lingered in the neighborhood. Twelve hours later, he fatally shot MIT physicist Nuno F.G. Loureiro in the foyer of his own home.
Newly released reports from the Brookline Police Department detail Valente’s movement on the streets of Brookline before carrying out a targeted execution.
In security camera footage and witness interviews, police discovered that Valente had been hiding in plain sight. He drew no attention to himself as he traversed through Brookline streets for a full day, waiting for Loureiro.
Police later learned that Valente was the man who opened fire inside a Brown University physics department building, shooting 11 students and killing two during an economics study session. Authorities searched for a suspect for five days before Valente killed himself Dec. 18 in New Hampshire.
Valente, who had crossed paths with Loureiro decades earlier at a university in their native Portugal, had harbored resentments over Loureiro’s successful career, reporters at The Boston Globe found.
At the time of the shootings, investigators had no concrete evidence linking them.
But Brookline police records show that despite having just committed a mass shooting in Providence, Rhode Island, Valente spent a full day in Loureiro’s neighborhood before killing him that evening. The records were first reported on by the Boston Herald.
Throughout the day, Valente made various stops, all within a mile of Loureiro’s home at 9 Gibbs St.
While Valente was parked on Babcock Street for about four and a half hours, Loureiro was at MIT overseeing PhD qualifying examinations, according to police records.
Around 1:30 p.m., Valente was seen on security footage walking along Commonwealth Avenue past Jumbo Seafood, Canna Dispensary, and Fiya Chicken before entering Pho Viet’s, where he purchased a sandwich with cash.
Police interviewed the employee who served Valente, who said there was nothing notable about their interaction.
Around the same time, Loureiro attended a research council meeting and by 3 p.m. was overseeing another qualifying examination.
Loureiro’s last known professional activity was after 5 p.m., when he approved a visitor log form via email, a colleague said.
Soon after, he was watching a movie at home with his daughters while his wife went to dance class.
Around 8 p.m., Valente began what police described as “preoperational surveillance,” circling the immediate neighborhood multiple times.
Police wrote that Valente was most likely “gathering information of the neighborhood layout by his repeated presence and probable mapping of routes, including entry and exit points.”
At 8:22 p.m., a neighbor’s Ring camera captured Valente wearing a yellow reflective safety vest carrying a box with a barcode, a disguise that led Loureiro’s daughter to believe he was a delivery driver.
Loureiro was in the kitchen with his wife, who had returned from her dance class, when the doorbell rang.
He stepped into the foyer to answer the door and was shot in his chest, abdomen and thigh. Inside, Loureiro’s family heard his screams and then silence.
In the days after the killing, Brookline police interviewed Loureiro’s family, colleagues and students, who said he was well-liked and had no clear reason to be targeted.
A professor and director of MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, Loureiro managed a major research lab that employed around 250 staff and students. He worked closely with graduate students in the nuclear science and engineering and physics programs and had recently implemented a new mentoring program.
Although there were typical academic pains, police interviews with students and colleagues found no evidence that Loureiro had seriously angered anyone.
Loureiro’s family told police they were unaware of any threats or issues, and did not notice any “strange interactions.”
Loureiro was pronounced dead at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center early the morning after the shooting.
After he opened fire, Valente drove off in the Nissan with its headlights and taillights turned off and disappeared into the night, concluding his 12-hour stint in Brookline. He was later found dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire.
This story is part of a partnership between Brookline.News and the Boston University Department of Journalism.