For Luís, 48 years old (Cláudio’s age), all this is an absolute contradiction with the boy he met as a colleague at Técnico and, even after that, at course and birthday dinners, when the class met. “He was perfectly integrated. He went to course dinners, went to super arraiais, told jokes, went to the cinema with us, to shopping centers. And at the time I knew where he lived — we all lived, those from outside Lisbon, in rented rooms, we didn’t go to each other’s houses, but we had dinner, we went for a drink. He wasn’t more mysterious than most. He wasn’t a outsider. He didn’t isolate himself any more than others. Cláudio was perfectly normal. Until he gave up his doctorate at Brown, after a year of being there, in 2001.”
Even after dropping out, Luís guarantees, his former colleague went to course dinners. “I remember him working as a computer scientist at SAPO [portal da então Portugal Telecom, hoje Altice, onde, como o DN revelou esta sexta-feira, trabalhou durante dois períodos, o primeiro dos quais a partir de 2001, por uns cinco anos, o segundo, segundo a Altice, entre 2010 e 2013]I wasn’t happy, but it was OK. We talked about his time at Brown, about giving up on his PhD, he said ‘I didn’t really like that’. He was of the opinion that Brown didn’t have the quality he wanted. But it seemed to me like he was handling it well the last time we spoke.”
When would that have been? “Around 2010. Then I also left Portugal, I was no longer available to go to dinners. From the moment he returned to the USA we lost all trace of him. His decline, his entry into the black hole inside his head that led to these tragic consequences, would have started somewhere around that time. The resentment towards Brown, the inability to deal with his failure — or what he understood to be his failure, or his disillusionment, I don’t know how he understood his journey…”
Apparently this process took a long time — from 2017 to 2025. “Because, there you go, he wasn’t a monster. If he was a psychopath, it would have been an instantaneous thing. But he wasn’t.”
“I don’t like the word genius, but that’s what he was”
There are distinct echoes of this man whose memory Luís tries to reconcile with the brutal events of the last week, beginning with the attack on Brown, on December 13th, which resulted in the death of two young students, Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, and which the American authorities began to believe had no connection with the murder of physicist Nuno Loureiro, on the night of the 15th, in another state (Brown is in Providence, Rhode Island, Nuno was murdered in Brookline, in the area metropolitan area of Boston, capital of Massachusetts).
There is, from the outset, the perspective of Filipe Moura, a mathematical physicist who, in the same course as Cláudio but more advanced, was a monitor for the Mathematical Analysis III course in his class.
As DN reported this Friday, without naming him, Filipe Moura wrote a post on Facebook in which he describes Cláudio as a student “who was obviously one of the best, an outlier” (he would graduate with 19 points, according to information communicated by the Técnico), but “arrogant”, “unpleasant”, who would get into arguments in class with other students because he had “a great need to stand out and show that he was better than the others”“often getting involved in arguments with colleagues who he didn’t consider as brilliant as him (and who probably weren’t – but they were his colleagues and had every right to be there)”.
He was, the physicist tells DN, “very impatient. There were many people with very developed egos on the course and he wanted to demonstrate that they were not as smart as they thought. He created problems in classes.” The conflict occurred, he reflects, “especially with people who were armed well, in an attitude typical of a gifted child.”
Luís has never seen anything like this: “Cláudio was a demanding guy. With himself and with others, teachers and colleagues. He read the books beforehand so as not to be caught by surprise in class. He was attentive and intervened, yes, if he thought that an argument was poorly founded. But I don’t believe I ever said ‘you’re stupid’, ‘you don’t understand, you don’t know what you’re talking about’. I’ve never seen him do anything like that. He wasn’t one to stand up and insult, to shout.”
Filipe Moura, however, insists: the pose existed and Cláudio took it to Brown. “I exchanged many emails with him at that time and I saw that he maintained the same attitude – as he told me – of raising unnecessary conflicts with his PhD colleagues in classes, who once again he considered to be much less capable than him – and who probably would be. I could see that he was not enjoying being at Brown University, but I tried to convince him that this would be an initial phase, a cultural shock, but that this PhD was an excellent opportunity that he should not waste, and that when I started doing research and finished the curricular phase, I would definitely like it.”