Four Remarkable "B" Murders

What are your thoughts on Brown, Bondi Beach, Brentwood, or Brookline?

Open thread on the Big Four murders since Saturday:

Brown University — the shooter is still on the lam, which is extremely unusual in school shootings. We don’t know much about him from video cameras other than he is pudgy, about 5’8” and fairly fair-skinned (i.e., he’s not an aspiring rapper).

The cops had arrested a skinny veteran student, but then let him go when it turned out that he was obviously not the shooter.

Right wing Twitter erupted on Tuesday with speculation about a portly “queer” Palestinian activist on campus, but who knows? Brilliant amateur detective work or just another massive screw-up like the arrest of the innocent man?

Bondi Beach - death toll up to 15 by now.

Rob Reiner and his wife — the drug addict son has been arrested on charges of stabbing to death his parents in their Brentwood home.

MIT physicist Nuno Loureiro

The Portuguese physicist was head of MIT’s giant fusion energy lab, a 250,000 square foot facility at which 250 professors, staff, and students work. He was gunned down in the foyer of his condominium complex, where he lived with his wife and three kids, in posh, peaceful Brookline, MA.

If you were making up a list of the Most Valuable Immigrants in the United States, Dr. Loureiro would be up near the top. (One of my oldest lines is that our immigration policy should focus more on getting more Enrico Fermis and fewer Sirhan Sirhans. Professor Loureiro was a whole lot closer to the Fermi than the Sirhan pole.)

From the Jerusalem Post:

Israel examining possibility Iran involved in murder of nuclear scientist in US - report

This is an assessment that has not yet been verified and is not supported at this stage by official findings from the investigative authorities in the United States.

By ANNA BARSKY

DECEMBER 17, 2025 18:22

Israel has murdered a lot of Iranian physicists over the years to retard Iran’s nuclear weapons program. I knew an Iranian emigre lady who was a physics teacher in Los Angeles because one of her sons had been a physics prodigy in Iran and she didn’t want him drafted into Iran’s nuclear weapons program and then assassinated by Mossad. So she moved to America and he got a full ride to Caltech.

Israel’s ally America pretty much got done inventing nuclear weapons a few generations ago, so murdering American nuclear bomb physicists wouldn’t do much to America’s nuclear weapons stockpile. But maybe the Iranians think that one of our top men working on peacetime fusion energy in the U.S. is fair game?

Sounds like a stretch, though …

Various Twitter geniuses reported that Professor Loureiro was an outspoken Zionist, but that turned out instead to be a guy in Israel with a similar name. A friend of the dead man reported that as the head of a huge lab doing crucial work, the physicist had not expressed a public opinion on the enormously divisive Gaza issue that is 0% relevant to getting important work done on fusion energy.

Brookline is about an hour’s drive from Providence, site of Saturday’s classroom shooting. Maybe that shooter is on a Charles Starkweather-like spree targeting elite academia? Sounds nuts, but when dealing with unknown murderers, craziness is always a possibility.

Anyway, that’s all I know at the moment. So let’s hear your thoughts in the comments, which are open to all to contribute to in this non-paywalled post.