By Duarte Mendonca, CNN
Lisbon (CNN) — Former neighbors paint a mixed portrait of Claudio Neves Valente, whose motives remain a mystery more than a week after police say he killed two Brown University students and an MIT professor, portraying a “very bright” but reclusive young man who was estranged from his family and whose mother once told a neighbor that her son “needs help.”
CNN visited the apartment building that Neves Valente, a native of Portugal, lived in as a student more than two decades ago before moving to the United States. The brown, cream and gray high-rise in Olivais, a modest middle-class neighborhood in eastern Lisbon, looks much like others in the area.
People who knew him there said they remain in shock after US authorities identified Neves Valente as the gunman who shot 11 people at Rhode Island’s Brown University, two of them fatally, on December 13 and mortally wounded a former Portuguese classmate, MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, two days later in Brookline, Massachusetts. On Thursday night, police found Neves Valente, 48, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a storage facility he rented in New Hampshire.
Residents of his Lisbon neighborhood told CNN the former Ivy League student was extremely smart and polite, but reclusive. At the time he lived there, he was studying at the Instituto Superior Técnico, one of Portugal’s most prestigious engineering schools.
The institute confirmed to CNN that Neves Valente and Loureiro were both students there between 1995 and 2000, and that Neves Valente studied for a degree in technological physics engineering.
Maria Margarida Baptista, a neighbor, recalled working with Neves Valente on administrative tasks for the apartment building, duties assigned to residents for up to three years on a rotating basis. “He was always very diligent” with the math and bills, she told CNN. “Everything in the administration was always very well done.” He would always greet her and address her by name, she added. “I really liked him.”
Despite not having seen him for more than 25 years, she said she was stunned by the news of the attack at Brown. “I was in shock,” she said. “I didn’t even recognize him on TV … I remember him as a boy, a student, a teenager. A very responsible teenager.”
“He was a bit strange,” Baptista said, “but he was a very bright boy.”
Neighbors say Neves Valente’s reclusiveness extended beyond the community. According to residents, he also avoided contact with his immediate family. His parents would come to visit his apartment, ring the bell, and he wouldn’t open the front door, a woman living nearby who declined to give her name told CNN.
Neves Valente’s parents would sometimes hide and wait outside the building, hoping to speak with Neves Valente, the woman said.
“He changed the locks. He knew they were around. He wouldn’t leave the house – it was like he was hiding from them.” She said Neves Valente’s mother often relied on her for information.
The woman said simply confirming she had seen Neves Valente would bring his mother relief. “She would relax because she knew he was alive,” the neighbor recalled. “All they wanted was to spend time with him, but they never got to see him. He didn’t want to see his parents.”
Baptista recalled one occasion when the mother, for unknown reasons, feared that something bad had happened to Neves Valente inside the apartment. “The parents came with firefighters and police to break through the windows to check if he was dead,” she said.
They were eventually able to get inside, but he was not home. Neighbors said Neves Valente was extremely upset when he learned his parents had involved the