He withdrew from Brown’s PhD program some years ago. Whatever reason for the withdrawal, his life certainly wasn’t what he had wished. I agree with your speculation.
Perhaps of note is that the murdered MIT professor had a wife and kids and was very popular. He also had “smart guy” good looks, whereas the Brown shooter was homely.
Sounds like a novel about two school friends and their divergent lives. Nabokov has lots of jealous assassins in his book. (His father was assassinated.)
Knowledge and productively should be rewards in themselves. Perhaps the Medieval University has something to teach us about really committing to the life of the mind.
The MIT shooting was very targeted, so the Brown shooting was likely targeted as well, even though several students were shot. Was the Alabama Republican girl the principal target at Brown?? Was she the only one who was shot more than once? Hopefully there will be some info or evidence to shed light on the target there.
Consider what I found by asking Google what building the Brown University shooting took place in...
"Officials were questioned about the lack of sufficient security cameras in the Barus & Holley engineering and *physics* building ..."
I know the students gathered there were in some econ class taught by a Jewish Professor but IIRC it was a final exam review/study session, not a regular class session. I would not be surprised if the shooter just assumed that since it was the physics building that all the classes meeting there would be physics related. Since he'd been a student at Brown, though not for a few years, he may have simply targeted the building he was most familiar with.
That still doesn't explain why he shot the girl. The suicide is also hard to believe. No note, manifesto or anything and he kills himself. Not buying it.
Maybe the main target was his Portuguese rival but he wanted to shoot up a soft target on the way out of town to settle his nerves (and maybe just get out some anger at his old department)
Erik, I have been told by you that you don't like me being overly personal.
But.
I spent a whole night with a serial killer who broke into my house in 1986. Go Mets. I had never even seen a fistfight before that time. I had also never seen the whole house, as my roomate and I had just rented it, and he was with his girlfriend, and I didn't even know where the back door was, but I did know that there was one house next door, a bank parking lot between me and HW41, empty at night, then two big parking lots for closed grocery stores across from me. I worked a lot of jobs on that stretch of highway in my college days.
So I had hours to try every tactic to escape. He was a "catch and release," working up to killing. Lucky me I was an early one. What I learned in those hours, and what makes me crazy about these stories, setting aside the politics and geopolitics, is that they don't fight back. Experts have known this for decades, but it still isn't taught -- not to students (little kids excepted), not to employees. Don't just sit there. Storm the guy. Everyone storm the guy. Break shit, throw shit, scream. There were how many people in that room? How many men? Even if you're alone, break everything, scream like hell, surprise them. Throw computers, chairs; form masses of people and tackle him. Break windows; don't call your parents. Call the fucking police; call 911; put the phone down, and scream into it.
This is important. It is the accepted tactic among professionals but still not taught. Don't sit there frozen like a rabbit and wait to be picked off.
When I began teaching, I was lucky to have lots of Gulf War veterans in my classrooms. We all had required "mass shooter event training" by then; we laughed about it together. I knew that if we ever had an "event" in those classrooms, the guy wouldn't last two minutes.
Queer Palestinian activists talk big, lots of murderous words. But I can’t imagine them shooting anyone. It’s very difficult for regular people to think about violence. Their minds seem to slip away from it.
I suspect the PsTB at Brown where crapping stones when they figured out the VP of the Campus Republicans was killed. I suspect their emails and Slack channels are full of people making threats of violence against her.
Yes, but only where violence carries a high likelihood of serious cost. I spent a Sunday service at a church where nearly every male in attendance is a drone operator.
They were extremely pleasant normies.
See also the difference between how people speak to each other in public vs private.
Recently some piece of garbage left a series of incoherent hate messages under my YouTube videos (he is a wealthy jewish chauvinist while I am only ⅓ of those). This he did without knowing that his legal name was discernible behind his youtube nom de guerre.
Under his own name - ar the same time! - he wrote me very sweet and supportive emails...
People think about violence plenty, they are just too cowardly to risk engaging it.
P.S. Yes, I wrote the motherfucker.
He also accidentally outted himself as one of the super duper very very bad Jews who tried to undo the lesson of my life in Egypt (that "antisemitism" is handwaving nonsense and that an openly proud Rabbi, who lectured in support of Israel worldwide had zero problems with Egyptians) by using his wealth and connections to get out own American government to sick the super confused Egyptian authorities against me in the hope that they would kill me, as policemen in my city of Alexandria have done before.
Of course I am fine and that little murderer wannabbee failed. To your original point however, "regular people" will gladly engage in violence if it's free.
If you give them enough leash, they'll do it. That guy who shot Kirk is very probably a Pro-Palestinian. The guy who tried taking out Trump in August 2024 was probably too. Too bad we can't interview him about his political convictions, sic!
If he was riled up about Ukraine, he was probably crawling on the ceiling about Palestine. Look at Greta Thunberg, for example, a representative Aspie.
I was one of those who assumed that because the shooter targeted a class taught by a professor of Judaic studies, which apparently dealt with economics from a Jewish perspective, and because the shooting occurred on the first day of Hanukah that the shooter must necessarily have been motivated by some animus against Jews. I didn't carry that line of thought any further to target any particular group, since now so many have reason for such an animus.
I certainly didn't consider the warped thinking of some psycho who felt that his career as a brilliant physicist was thwarted by a conspiracy involving a building in Providence and a classmate from his time in Portugal.
The case reminds me of an incident that occurred between 1969 and 1970 in the Mathematics Department of the University of Pennsylvania. A thesis advisor noticed that one of his doctoral candidates had been ABD for an exceptionally long time and seemed to be morphing into a professional grad student. He gave the student one year to complete a dissertation and get his PhD or be forced to leave Penn without a degree. In desperation the student searched through a Russian Journal in his specialty and plagiarized an article. Apparently he reasoned that the journal was obscure enough that he wouldn't be caught.
Unfortunately for him, either the chair of the Math Department or his advisor -- I can't recall which -- subscribed to that journal and the plagiarism was quickly discovered. The student was immediately expelled from the program. This happened towards the end of 1969. In January or February of 1970 the student broke into a Math Department faculty meeting and shot the place up, killing one or two faculty and IIRC wounding several others. He then disappeared. His mummified body was discovered months later in some nook of the Math and Physics Building, where he'd secreted himself before committing suicide.
One conclusion one might draw from incidents like these is that, from a purely personal perspective, it's not a good idea to thwart the career plans of psycho, STEM grad students.
"Economics from a Jewish perspective"? Do you mean a course that discusses Marx or Freidman or *actual* "economics from a Jewish perspective, be it biblical means of determining value or religious law relating to damages, etc.
If you mean something like the latter example, please spill! That's an interesting subject of which I am myself a student (and perhaps teacher, though I would rather not be, because representating divine law is a tough matter to meet).
When I was at NYU, partly because of stories like this (and less murderous ones), they kicked out all math PhD students after 7 years, no matter what.
Sometimes, somebody would complete their doctorates elsewhere, but mostly, we ABDs would take a hint and do something else. (I left after my 6th year and became an actuary....others left earlier and became quants)
Whereas humanities types are allowed to stick around forever? (My PhD is in history, I encountered quite a few people over the years who clocked in a decade on the doctorate!). But the stories of grads going postal always seem to involve mathematicians or physicists.
In fairness, the most honestly leftist professor and a very, very liberal fellow grad student showed great loyalty to me when I was attacked in academia, and they remain friends to today, for which I am eternally grateful. It renews your faith in humane grace and class. Whereas I know several "conservative" cough cowards with national recognition and big paydays who screwed over every actually conservative student or mentee they had. There are grifters everywhere, and they are often the successful ones. Oddly, in academia, I see this as a larger problem for the right than the left.
Yeah well there are benefits to academia (to quote Ghostbusters: “I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.”)
That said, one of the funnier things was listening to the Comp Sci faculty bitch about the pattern of losing grad students to industry and then gaining them when the market was down.
Younger people than I who have a particular set of (math) skills are making insane bank working on AI for the big companies. I mean multiples of 4 or more vs what I was making at a similar point in my career adjusting for inflation. In ten years those jobs will be gone/paying scale again.
I went back to construction, which I love, took classes when I could, cared for three sick family members and my professor until they died, matriculated, then burned my Ph.D. diploma the same day.
I am an intellectual in Renaissance Poetry; between-the-wars American History; Post-War poetry and literature, and medical policy and history by choice. I also rock at plumbing and drywall, and I don't suck at design, roofing, or framing. OK at foundation work. I once replaced a torn-away outdoor door during a hurricane. It hung perfectly. I did it alone.
So, you do what you have to do. What I resent is the adjunct system, where, if you care, you make less than working in fast food. I resent affirmative action abd DEI, which kept many better teachers than I working for pennies, while subpar sexual and racial minorities were given endless, extreme opportunities.
I know people who taught eight classes a semester, including summers, at several different colleges just to make 24K a year. I called bullshit and taught a class here and there to keep my hand in, but it was basically charity and love of the work. Meanwhile, the tenured class usually had a 2/2 or 2/1 schedule, wrote unread books, and dialled it in. Asswipes. Don't go to college. Creatively find online ways and search out a good language or a great STEM teacher here and there and take one class. Think Victor Davis Hanson.
Doctors and lawyers, CPAs, actuaries, do need degrees. But they should work quickly towards those goals, work summers, and get to it. They usually do. If they don't, they need to leave.
I mostly resent that faculty senates created the adjunct system in the Humanities so they didn't have to really teach anymore. Only the rich AND connected should consider grad school. I'd still throw a desk to save them from a school shooter. I honor the real Humanities.
Why the official vagueness about what the Brown shooter shouted? “Something” is all we can know? If they had disclosed the words, or the language, or anything, it might have helped find and stop the guy before he got to MIT. Maybe he did shout “Allah Akbar,” but as misdirection or a dark joke…?
When I was lobbying and blogging regularly on crime policy, I communicated with the evangelical founder of Restorative Justice. He denounced it. He said it had been taken over by defence attorneys to get their clients out early and that victims were pressured immensely to participate and that it had nothing to do with restitution or rehabilitation anymore.
But the media loved it.
Which I knew already, but it was nice to be reinforced.
A useful concept I heard from an FBI psychologist was the term "grudge collector." Bruce Edwards who is the person attributed with the anthrax attacks of 2001 is described as a grudge collector. President Trump can be similarly described.
Incidentally, Providence and neighboring Fall River, Mass is the the center of the Portuguese-American community in the US. The shooter may have lived in the area and drifted in menial or blue collar work (there are lots of Portuguese restaurants and small businesses in the area) after his physics career never took off.
Or it's possible that the assassinated MIT physicist had stolen the identity of the shooter back when they were young in Portugal before embarking for the US, and achieved his career through the stolen identity and stolen valor, and the shooter had taken revenge for it. Now we'll never know since they're both dead and I imagine the case will be closed and the authorities won't investigate further.
If the MIT guy was the primary target, the one he possibly knew personally, why didn't he kill him first? The Brown shooting had much higher risk of death or capture.
Did the alleged killer first want to horrify the primary target, i.e. the MIT superProf, by shooting up his old department, thereby striking a death blow against the field of physics? Or was his primary anger directed against Brown for failing him, maybe, and his fury against the MIT prof was secondary?
These conjectures don't make much sense. Like you say, you'd think he'd kill the guy he hated first, straight up, and then go down to Brown and go out in a blaze of self-immolating glory.
But then I'm not a mass killer, nor do I aspire to be one, so I probably don't think like one.
He'd never shot anyone before. Maybe he figured the first one is the hardest so get that out of the way on a soft target, learn to deal with the emotional reaction then be calm and methodical for the real show.
The only thing I have to offer in this conversation is that you should check out the movie “Mystic Pizza”, the movie that started Julia Robert’s career and is about the Portuguese in Providence.
A joke about the freshmen at MIT if half of them go from being the smartest student in their high school to being in bottom half of their class. It drives many of them crazy and is why MIT and Cal Tech have higher suicide rates than Harvard or Stanford.
I dunno, seems like a more reasonable plan would be to do the murder and THEN the school shooting. I know we aren't talking about a reasonable person, but he probably did ruminate on this before doing it. People usually stew for a while and fantasize before popping off.
I can easily imagine being wrong in the case of genuine psychopathy or psychosis, where realistic fantasizing is implausible. That would also match the impulsive "drive-by" type of shooter.
Committing the shooting on a Saturday does not support the idea that the shooter had an intended target. Looking for specific person on a Saturday during finals week has a low probability of being successful.
Through yesterday, there has been a lot of digital ink spilled on Twitter about the Keystone Kops aspects of the Brown case. DEI Providence Chief of Police, clueless-appearing head of their Detective Bureau, publicity-hungry state AG, DEI (again) chief of the Brown U. police force. "The case has gone cold thanks to their incompetence," etc.
Obviously, Law Enforcement was making great strides behind the scenes. "Now it can be told" stories of a Reddit user's tip that was heeded (and broke the case), searches of car rental records, Providence-Brookline police cooperation, and so forth.
So what combination of LE agencies did the heavy lifting? The seemingly-inept? FBI? State Police? Were those being held to ridicule boat anchors, or key players?
The story about lack of cameras was true. The reddit tip came from a homeless man who encountered the perpetrator coming and going. He gave a description of the car. I don't know if they had this information at the time of the providence police chief press conference that was so very inept appearing.
It appears that the skell was allowed to sleep in the building because he was a former Brown student. Not what you’d call a ringing endorsement for that esteemed Ivy League citadel of learning.
Call me crazy, but I've learned to trust Sailer's Law of Mass Shootings.
Well, it's accurate. But besides that, who knows?
He withdrew from Brown’s PhD program some years ago. Whatever reason for the withdrawal, his life certainly wasn’t what he had wished. I agree with your speculation.
Perhaps of note is that the murdered MIT professor had a wife and kids and was very popular. He also had “smart guy” good looks, whereas the Brown shooter was homely.
Sounds like a novel about two school friends and their divergent lives. Nabokov has lots of jealous assassins in his book. (His father was assassinated.)
Imagine writing novels like that to work out your feelings around your father dying like that. Novelist is a lonely job.
Knowledge and productively should be rewards in themselves. Perhaps the Medieval University has something to teach us about really committing to the life of the mind.
The MIT shooting was very targeted, so the Brown shooting was likely targeted as well, even though several students were shot. Was the Alabama Republican girl the principal target at Brown?? Was she the only one who was shot more than once? Hopefully there will be some info or evidence to shed light on the target there.
Consider what I found by asking Google what building the Brown University shooting took place in...
"Officials were questioned about the lack of sufficient security cameras in the Barus & Holley engineering and *physics* building ..."
I know the students gathered there were in some econ class taught by a Jewish Professor but IIRC it was a final exam review/study session, not a regular class session. I would not be surprised if the shooter just assumed that since it was the physics building that all the classes meeting there would be physics related. Since he'd been a student at Brown, though not for a few years, he may have simply targeted the building he was most familiar with.
That still doesn't explain why he shot the girl. The suicide is also hard to believe. No note, manifesto or anything and he kills himself. Not buying it.
He shot about 20 people at Brown and 2 of them died.
Maybe the main target was his Portuguese rival but he wanted to shoot up a soft target on the way out of town to settle his nerves (and maybe just get out some anger at his old department)
Erik, I have been told by you that you don't like me being overly personal.
But.
I spent a whole night with a serial killer who broke into my house in 1986. Go Mets. I had never even seen a fistfight before that time. I had also never seen the whole house, as my roomate and I had just rented it, and he was with his girlfriend, and I didn't even know where the back door was, but I did know that there was one house next door, a bank parking lot between me and HW41, empty at night, then two big parking lots for closed grocery stores across from me. I worked a lot of jobs on that stretch of highway in my college days.
So I had hours to try every tactic to escape. He was a "catch and release," working up to killing. Lucky me I was an early one. What I learned in those hours, and what makes me crazy about these stories, setting aside the politics and geopolitics, is that they don't fight back. Experts have known this for decades, but it still isn't taught -- not to students (little kids excepted), not to employees. Don't just sit there. Storm the guy. Everyone storm the guy. Break shit, throw shit, scream. There were how many people in that room? How many men? Even if you're alone, break everything, scream like hell, surprise them. Throw computers, chairs; form masses of people and tackle him. Break windows; don't call your parents. Call the fucking police; call 911; put the phone down, and scream into it.
This is important. It is the accepted tactic among professionals but still not taught. Don't sit there frozen like a rabbit and wait to be picked off.
When I began teaching, I was lucky to have lots of Gulf War veterans in my classrooms. We all had required "mass shooter event training" by then; we laughed about it together. I knew that if we ever had an "event" in those classrooms, the guy wouldn't last two minutes.
It was a good target, spatially. Easy in, easy out. Still weird.
Queer Palestinian activists talk big, lots of murderous words. But I can’t imagine them shooting anyone. It’s very difficult for regular people to think about violence. Their minds seem to slip away from it.
I suspect the PsTB at Brown where crapping stones when they figured out the VP of the Campus Republicans was killed. I suspect their emails and Slack channels are full of people making threats of violence against her.
Yes, but only where violence carries a high likelihood of serious cost. I spent a Sunday service at a church where nearly every male in attendance is a drone operator.
They were extremely pleasant normies.
See also the difference between how people speak to each other in public vs private.
Recently some piece of garbage left a series of incoherent hate messages under my YouTube videos (he is a wealthy jewish chauvinist while I am only ⅓ of those). This he did without knowing that his legal name was discernible behind his youtube nom de guerre.
Under his own name - ar the same time! - he wrote me very sweet and supportive emails...
People think about violence plenty, they are just too cowardly to risk engaging it.
P.S. Yes, I wrote the motherfucker.
He also accidentally outted himself as one of the super duper very very bad Jews who tried to undo the lesson of my life in Egypt (that "antisemitism" is handwaving nonsense and that an openly proud Rabbi, who lectured in support of Israel worldwide had zero problems with Egyptians) by using his wealth and connections to get out own American government to sick the super confused Egyptian authorities against me in the hope that they would kill me, as policemen in my city of Alexandria have done before.
Of course I am fine and that little murderer wannabbee failed. To your original point however, "regular people" will gladly engage in violence if it's free.
Story here →
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/nobel-prize-winning-meeting-live
If you give them enough leash, they'll do it. That guy who shot Kirk is very probably a Pro-Palestinian. The guy who tried taking out Trump in August 2024 was probably too. Too bad we can't interview him about his political convictions, sic!
Routh was apparently really wound up about Ukraine. Probably still believed the Russia hoax.
If he was riled up about Ukraine, he was probably crawling on the ceiling about Palestine. Look at Greta Thunberg, for example, a representative Aspie.
I still think we should deport them. Look, why take a chance? At least, that's the way I feel about it.
It's still too early and there isn't enough information.
I was one of those who assumed that because the shooter targeted a class taught by a professor of Judaic studies, which apparently dealt with economics from a Jewish perspective, and because the shooting occurred on the first day of Hanukah that the shooter must necessarily have been motivated by some animus against Jews. I didn't carry that line of thought any further to target any particular group, since now so many have reason for such an animus.
I certainly didn't consider the warped thinking of some psycho who felt that his career as a brilliant physicist was thwarted by a conspiracy involving a building in Providence and a classmate from his time in Portugal.
The case reminds me of an incident that occurred between 1969 and 1970 in the Mathematics Department of the University of Pennsylvania. A thesis advisor noticed that one of his doctoral candidates had been ABD for an exceptionally long time and seemed to be morphing into a professional grad student. He gave the student one year to complete a dissertation and get his PhD or be forced to leave Penn without a degree. In desperation the student searched through a Russian Journal in his specialty and plagiarized an article. Apparently he reasoned that the journal was obscure enough that he wouldn't be caught.
Unfortunately for him, either the chair of the Math Department or his advisor -- I can't recall which -- subscribed to that journal and the plagiarism was quickly discovered. The student was immediately expelled from the program. This happened towards the end of 1969. In January or February of 1970 the student broke into a Math Department faculty meeting and shot the place up, killing one or two faculty and IIRC wounding several others. He then disappeared. His mummified body was discovered months later in some nook of the Math and Physics Building, where he'd secreted himself before committing suicide.
One conclusion one might draw from incidents like these is that, from a purely personal perspective, it's not a good idea to thwart the career plans of psycho, STEM grad students.
"Economics from a Jewish perspective"? Do you mean a course that discusses Marx or Freidman or *actual* "economics from a Jewish perspective, be it biblical means of determining value or religious law relating to damages, etc.
If you mean something like the latter example, please spill! That's an interesting subject of which I am myself a student (and perhaps teacher, though I would rather not be, because representating divine law is a tough matter to meet).
When I was at NYU, partly because of stories like this (and less murderous ones), they kicked out all math PhD students after 7 years, no matter what.
Sometimes, somebody would complete their doctorates elsewhere, but mostly, we ABDs would take a hint and do something else. (I left after my 6th year and became an actuary....others left earlier and became quants)
It's a good policy.
Whereas humanities types are allowed to stick around forever? (My PhD is in history, I encountered quite a few people over the years who clocked in a decade on the doctorate!). But the stories of grads going postal always seem to involve mathematicians or physicists.
They just mau mau their enemies to death.
In fairness, the most honestly leftist professor and a very, very liberal fellow grad student showed great loyalty to me when I was attacked in academia, and they remain friends to today, for which I am eternally grateful. It renews your faith in humane grace and class. Whereas I know several "conservative" cough cowards with national recognition and big paydays who screwed over every actually conservative student or mentee they had. There are grifters everywhere, and they are often the successful ones. Oddly, in academia, I see this as a larger problem for the right than the left.
I like that the penalty for failure at a phD effort in maths is you have to take a job in which you make hugely more moolah.
Yeah well there are benefits to academia (to quote Ghostbusters: “I’ve worked in the private sector. They expect results.”)
That said, one of the funnier things was listening to the Comp Sci faculty bitch about the pattern of losing grad students to industry and then gaining them when the market was down.
Younger people than I who have a particular set of (math) skills are making insane bank working on AI for the big companies. I mean multiples of 4 or more vs what I was making at a similar point in my career adjusting for inflation. In ten years those jobs will be gone/paying scale again.
Then why are they so bitter? You’d think the medieval lit scholar with zero industry options would be more annoyed.
I went back to construction, which I love, took classes when I could, cared for three sick family members and my professor until they died, matriculated, then burned my Ph.D. diploma the same day.
I am an intellectual in Renaissance Poetry; between-the-wars American History; Post-War poetry and literature, and medical policy and history by choice. I also rock at plumbing and drywall, and I don't suck at design, roofing, or framing. OK at foundation work. I once replaced a torn-away outdoor door during a hurricane. It hung perfectly. I did it alone.
So, you do what you have to do. What I resent is the adjunct system, where, if you care, you make less than working in fast food. I resent affirmative action abd DEI, which kept many better teachers than I working for pennies, while subpar sexual and racial minorities were given endless, extreme opportunities.
I know people who taught eight classes a semester, including summers, at several different colleges just to make 24K a year. I called bullshit and taught a class here and there to keep my hand in, but it was basically charity and love of the work. Meanwhile, the tenured class usually had a 2/2 or 2/1 schedule, wrote unread books, and dialled it in. Asswipes. Don't go to college. Creatively find online ways and search out a good language or a great STEM teacher here and there and take one class. Think Victor Davis Hanson.
Doctors and lawyers, CPAs, actuaries, do need degrees. But they should work quickly towards those goals, work summers, and get to it. They usually do. If they don't, they need to leave.
I mostly resent that faculty senates created the adjunct system in the Humanities so they didn't have to really teach anymore. Only the rich AND connected should consider grad school. I'd still throw a desk to save them from a school shooter. I honor the real Humanities.
One want to read about the review session that was going on.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/14/us/brown-shooting-classroom-victims.html
https://abcnews.go.com/US/made-eye-contact-brown-university-student-describes-alleged/story?id=128396967
Why the official vagueness about what the Brown shooter shouted? “Something” is all we can know? If they had disclosed the words, or the language, or anything, it might have helped find and stop the guy before he got to MIT. Maybe he did shout “Allah Akbar,” but as misdirection or a dark joke…?
I think of Theodore Streleski.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Karel_de_Leeuw#:~:text=Theodore%20Landon%20%22Ted%22%20Streleski%20(born,hammer%20on%20August%2018%2C%201978.
Yeesh. The murderer's 8 years in jail was half as long as his time (part/full) spent pursuing a math PhD.
[sarc] He was perfectly positioned for a second career, promoting Restorative Justice.[/sarc]
When I was lobbying and blogging regularly on crime policy, I communicated with the evangelical founder of Restorative Justice. He denounced it. He said it had been taken over by defence attorneys to get their clients out early and that victims were pressured immensely to participate and that it had nothing to do with restitution or rehabilitation anymore.
But the media loved it.
Which I knew already, but it was nice to be reinforced.
Steve,
A useful concept I heard from an FBI psychologist was the term "grudge collector." Bruce Edwards who is the person attributed with the anthrax attacks of 2001 is described as a grudge collector. President Trump can be similarly described.
Yeah; and Kaczynski, while we're on the Teds.
Incidentally, Providence and neighboring Fall River, Mass is the the center of the Portuguese-American community in the US. The shooter may have lived in the area and drifted in menial or blue collar work (there are lots of Portuguese restaurants and small businesses in the area) after his physics career never took off.
Or it's possible that the assassinated MIT physicist had stolen the identity of the shooter back when they were young in Portugal before embarking for the US, and achieved his career through the stolen identity and stolen valor, and the shooter had taken revenge for it. Now we'll never know since they're both dead and I imagine the case will be closed and the authorities won't investigate further.
You’ve got a filmscript there, get it registered now!
Mystic Pizza II
"Or it's possible..." that's a brilliant introduction to your off the wall original hypothesis.It's maybe comic bathos.
If the MIT guy was the primary target, the one he possibly knew personally, why didn't he kill him first? The Brown shooting had much higher risk of death or capture.
That's a great question.
Did the alleged killer first want to horrify the primary target, i.e. the MIT superProf, by shooting up his old department, thereby striking a death blow against the field of physics? Or was his primary anger directed against Brown for failing him, maybe, and his fury against the MIT prof was secondary?
These conjectures don't make much sense. Like you say, you'd think he'd kill the guy he hated first, straight up, and then go down to Brown and go out in a blaze of self-immolating glory.
But then I'm not a mass killer, nor do I aspire to be one, so I probably don't think like one.
Anyway, it's a very strange case indeed.
It does not appear that Nuno F. Gomes Loureiro was ever at Brown University.
https://nse.mit.edu/people/nuno-f-loureiro/
He'd never shot anyone before. Maybe he figured the first one is the hardest so get that out of the way on a soft target, learn to deal with the emotional reaction then be calm and methodical for the real show.
OK, I get the MIT nuclear physicist from Portugal angle. Still, this raises the question, why did he shoot up a small class at Brown's?
That's academia. Outside politics, I've never met a more screwed-up bunch of people.
The only thing I have to offer in this conversation is that you should check out the movie “Mystic Pizza”, the movie that started Julia Robert’s career and is about the Portuguese in Providence.
A passionate people if you go by the movie.
It’s even more disappointing to be a “loser” when you used to be a “winner”.
Perhaps it was a Brown U. professor who first knocked him off the winner’s glide path?
A joke about the freshmen at MIT if half of them go from being the smartest student in their high school to being in bottom half of their class. It drives many of them crazy and is why MIT and Cal Tech have higher suicide rates than Harvard or Stanford.
I dunno, seems like a more reasonable plan would be to do the murder and THEN the school shooting. I know we aren't talking about a reasonable person, but he probably did ruminate on this before doing it. People usually stew for a while and fantasize before popping off.
I can easily imagine being wrong in the case of genuine psychopathy or psychosis, where realistic fantasizing is implausible. That would also match the impulsive "drive-by" type of shooter.
Brown was on the way.
Oh, well that's just good time management.
My dad was exemplary at this. If he went to Boston to shoot an old rival, he absolutely would have done the Freedom Trail as long as he was there.
One possibility is that at Brown he missed the intended victim.
Committing the shooting on a Saturday does not support the idea that the shooter had an intended target. Looking for specific person on a Saturday during finals week has a low probability of being successful.
Through yesterday, there has been a lot of digital ink spilled on Twitter about the Keystone Kops aspects of the Brown case. DEI Providence Chief of Police, clueless-appearing head of their Detective Bureau, publicity-hungry state AG, DEI (again) chief of the Brown U. police force. "The case has gone cold thanks to their incompetence," etc.
Obviously, Law Enforcement was making great strides behind the scenes. "Now it can be told" stories of a Reddit user's tip that was heeded (and broke the case), searches of car rental records, Providence-Brookline police cooperation, and so forth.
So what combination of LE agencies did the heavy lifting? The seemingly-inept? FBI? State Police? Were those being held to ridicule boat anchors, or key players?
The story about lack of cameras was true. The reddit tip came from a homeless man who encountered the perpetrator coming and going. He gave a description of the car. I don't know if they had this information at the time of the providence police chief press conference that was so very inept appearing.
They did not.
The Daily Mail, slattern as they are, are the best source for such details. They make everyone else look like pikers.
RedState posted a report that the cops did not do the "heavy lifting". A homeless person who was allowed to sleep in the building at Brown U turned in the suspect.https://redstate.com/terichristoph/2025/12/19/how-a-homeless-guy-and-a-reddit-post-solved-the-brownmit-murders-n2197288
It appears that the skell was allowed to sleep in the building because he was a former Brown student. Not what you’d call a ringing endorsement for that esteemed Ivy League citadel of learning.
Plenty of Diogenes types at schools versus the expected Alexander types.
From the links, John the Homeless seems pretty capable.
I think the police were wrongly maligned.