Mass Shooting at Brown

[ucbalumnus]

@blossom

There are legitimate reasons why someone who has been apprehended and is a “person of interest” doesn’t immediately blab to the FBI that they couldn’t possibly have been in Providence when the murder took place to clear themselves.

Maybe they’re cheating on their spouse. Maybe they just lost 25K at a casino in CT and need time to come up with a narrative before going home to that spouse. Maybe they’re fleeing a domestic violence situation and can’t “out” themselves until they get assurance of protection from law enforcement. Maybe they’re in hiding from the mob. Who knows.

Or maybe they wanted to wait until they had a lawyer before talking to law enforcement who at the time believed that they were the main suspect in a serious crime?

[L_NewEngland]

That totally makes sense.

This reminds me of something I learned working and getting behind the scenes tour at a huge hotel.

If you ever leave something in a hotel room. They NEVER EVER will call you about it, no matter what it is. They will, however, have it logged, stored, and put in a super organized lost and found where things are stored by room, date found, etc. etc. SO so so many people are in hotels under not above board circumstances, they can’t risk calling. blew my mind!

[blossom]

Yes– really wild. BUT it’s not illegal to cheat on your spouse. It’s not illegal to lose money in a legal casino and then go back to your hotel room and take out your laptop and try to move money out of your 401K and into your checking account so your spouse doesn’t find out. You may not want USA Today reporting on what you were doing in that hotel room- but you didn’t commit a crime, you are within your rights to keep your mouth shut.

Someone else died because you didn’t jump in with “here’s my phone, it has a tracker on it, you can see I was in CT when you claim I was in Providence, don’t wait for a search warrant just check it now”– nobody could have foreseen that.

Least of all Keystone Kash. Who should be a little wiser but apparently doesn’t learn….

[TonyGrace]

@cquin85

@Bill_Marsh

It sounds like he had a difficult adjustment as a foreign student trying to learn a difficult subject in his second language.

Yes, I think that’s plausible. Physics is hard and many people try and bail from the subject. My astro-physics D has said many times that her undergraduate physics courses were more difficult than her graduate level math classes. I’m sure experiences vary but there’s no doubt physics isn’t for everyone. Perhaps that’s all we’re ever going to get. I hope he has family somewhere so that investigators have someone to interview to at least piece together a motive.

He was a top physics student at a (locally) prestigious undergraduate program, supposedly beating Loureiro for top honors in the same program. Thats how you get accepted to a PhD Program at a prestigious school. Physics deals in numbers. There was likely some old history and some sort of resentment that may come to light now that investigators a name.

@cquin85

My daughter, a math concentrator, had said the same thing last night, so I’m guessing that’s a potential partial explanation.

My understanding (through the Brown grapevine) is that that particular auditorium is the room for a large Physics lecture that was, in fact, having a 4pm final that day. Except, as it is common with exams, it was in a different building all together.

[Bill_Marsh]

@blossom

I’m reading people criticizing the custodian at Brown who saw the actual killer in the building a few days before the murder who didn’t “say something”.

Actually it turns out that he saw and interacted with the killer a couple of weeks before the murder.

[tsbna44]

I missed that - let me unvilify that part. Thanks for educating me.

[jym626]

I haven’t been on the Brown campus in a long time but articles are saying the courses he took would’ve been in that building. Whether something humiliating or traumatic or what have you happened in that building with this shooter we will never know.

[tsbna44]

Funny you say that because we are going to a day 8 hanukah celebration (public) but my wife wrote the organizers to ask questions about security, because you sign up and check in and that’s it. So anyone can sign up.

The kids come home tomorrow and now my wife says she’s concerned and doesn’t want to go - so this is what happened.

But not everyone has been in this situation. I’ve unfortunately been twice, losing my best college friend at 9/11.

We all handle these things differently.

And I do feel like I chose the wrong school because of this.

It’s how I’m wired.

But I also know I could never have known this up front.

[prezbucky]

@L_NewEngland

I suspect, though have no way of knowing, he is having a mid-life crisis and reliving his past - failed grad school - blaming an undegrad rival, etc.

Just a theory, but:

• Blames Brown for dropping out of the grad program (did he withdraw willingly or did they terminate him? regardless, he felt shafted apparently…)
• Envious of his old college classmate who went on to the relatively lofty position of MIT faculty member… perhaps blames them for some unknown reason, feels wronged, etc.

[admmda]

@prezbucky

Just a theory, but:

• Blames Brown for dropping out of the grad program (did he withdraw willingly or did they terminate him? regardless, he felt shafted apparently…)
• Envious of his old college classmate who went on to the relatively lofty position of MIT faculty member… perhaps blames them for some unknown reason, feels wronged, etc

Yes this tracks with what the profilers have been saying: an institutional grievance towards Brown, and a personal grievance towards Loureiro. It seems to be very unusual profile-wise for a shooter to combine both of these types of grievances into one action.

[TonyGrace]

@admmda

It seems to be very unusual profile-wise for a shooter to combine both of these types of grievances into one action.

I am not sure - Physics academia seems to be at the center of both.

[L_NewEngland]

@prezbucky

did he withdraw willingly

This… by reports as of now. (Could change). It was a Leave of Absence..

One classmate (now a physics prof) said the shooter was a “genius” (though hates that term) and thought classes were very easy, aand anther classmate said that he was struggling with classes (though that is vague language).

Also hasn’t spoken to his family in Portugal in decades, so probably struggling with mental health or something..(beyond obvious situation).

[cquin85]

@admmda

Yes this tracks with what the profilers have been saying: an institutional grievance towards Brown, and a personal grievance towards Loureiro. It seems to be very unusual profile-wise for a shooter to combine both of these types of grievances into one action.

I think they fit. Grievance toward Brown, for whatever reason, and jealous of a peer who is living the life he dreamed of living. Both fit the frustrated ambitions narrative. Couple that with psychopathy or some other mental disorder or event, and you can get this kind of result.

I’d be interested to learn more from the profilers as to why these two triggers are not typically linked or present in the same event.

[prezbucky]

In Criminology class about 30 years ago, we were told that the death penalty could not logically deter heinous crimes (or would only do so rarely…) because people who commit murder act according to one of the following scenarios:

1. It’s a crime of passion – they get so angry that they simply lose it and commit the act without thinking. Thus, they cannot be considering DP consequences.
2. The person is a sociopath, suffering from Antisocial Personality Disorder. These people believe they are smarter/better than everyone else and, thus, cannot be caught. They plan and calculate…
3. The person is a psychopath, suffering (likely) from Schizophrenia, and – unmedicated – they have little to no control over their thoughts or actions. The delusions made them do it.

Both of these required planning – he was armed. I’m gonna go out on a limb and presume he did not typically walk around packing heat. So he at least came ready to rumble.

Whether he had planned both (sociopathy or psychosis) or something simply set him off at Brown that day… a straw that broke the camel’s back so to speak… we can’t know with the info we’ve been given. But if the thing at Brown was a sudden fit of rage/crime of passion, he probably figured that his life was over anyway, so he might as well take out the professor too. In which case, the second murder would be calculated. (And regardless of what went down at Brown, there was time between the first set of shootings and the second… so he had time to think/plan/decide.)

[cquin85]

@TonyGrace

He was a top physics student at a (locally) prestigious undergraduate program, supposedly beating Loureiro for top honors in the same program. Thats how you get accepted to a PhD Program at a prestigious school. Physics deals in numbers. There was likely some old history and some sort of resentment that may come to light now that investigators a name.

Sure, we’re all speculating about what was in his head. He did withdraw after a short time, though, and my understanding about the first few years in a PhD program is that it involves a lot of coursework. Seems like something was going wrong unless he just changed his mind.

If it was just the MIT professor, then I’d be more inclined to speculate it was an old interpersonal issue. But coming back to your old campus and shooting random students paired with killing a successful physicist he once knew all smacks of frustrated ambitions and self-loathing to me. Honors as an undergraduate or not, I don’t think it’s unheard of for people to struggle in these programs.

[tsbna44]

@prezbucky

they get so angry that they simply lose it and commit the act without thinking.

I often wonder when they take their own life, why not do it first?

Sure we feel bad and say there’s hope -talk to someone. I mean none of these people, in reality, did anything to this guy.

[admmda]

@cquin85

I’d be interested to learn more from the profilers as to why these two triggers are not typically linked or present in the same event.

The context being discussed was the relationship between the two cases, so it may have been more an explanation as to why the two cases weren’t immediately linked by law enforcement. The MIT case initially had the hallmarks of a crime of passion.

[Bill_Marsh]

Yes, it was a leave of absence, but before the end of the semester. So, it would appear that he was counseled to take the voluntary leave option - unless there were personal, medical, of family issues which led him to drop out before the semester was over.

[L_NewEngland]

Brown campus shooter harbored resentment from time as a PhD student in the...

I was going by a globe article that said he thought it was too easy, had nothing to learn and thought the food was terrible and left..

”“During orientation he was sitting alone, and I walked up and said hello. He was terse at first, but we eventually broke the ice and became close,” Watson told the Globe in an e-mail Friday, describing himself as essentially Neves Valente’s only friend at the university.

Neves Valente was a brilliant student, but he could be frustrated by the curriculum at Brown, which he found underwhelming, Watson said.

“He was by far the best graduate student in our class. Through our conversations, he was already ready to graduate when he arrived,” Watson said. “I don’t like the word genius, but he was.”

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He said Neves Valente often griped about daily life in the US, including the food on campus, especially the lack of high-quality fish. The two would get dinner at a local Portuguese restaurant. They’d talk physics, but the conversations always ended in Neves Valente venting, Watson recalled.

During their last interaction, Neves Valente said he had decided to leave Brown because there was nothing left to learn from the courses. Watson said he tried to convince his friend to stay.

“He refused, and that was the last time I heard from him,” said Watson, who was shocked and saddened by news of the shooting.”

[Bill_Marsh]

Great find! I’ll get a copy of The Globe when I’m in Boston tomorrow and read that article since I can’t access it on line.