First Brown University Shooting, Then MIT Professor Murder, Police Investigate Possible Link

Authorities on Thursday continued the search for the killer of a world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor and fusion energy physicist who was shot and killed inside his home near Boston earlier this week – a suspicious attack that occurred just days after the deadly shooting at Brown University.

MIT professor and fusion energy physicist Nuno F. Gomes Loureiro, 47, was pronounced dead at a local area hospital on Tuesday after being shot multiple times at his Brookline home on Monday night. The Norfolk district attorney’s office and local authorities said they had launched a homicide investigation.

“It’s not hyperbole to say MIT is where you go to find solutions to humanity’s biggest problems,” Loureiro recently said when he was named the new head of MIT’s Plasma Science Lab. “Fusion energy will change the course of human history.”

The murder of Loureiro occurred two days after the Brown University shooting, which took place fewer than 50 miles away.

Local media WPRI Rhode Island reports that investigators are now searching for a possible link between the two shootings. 

Senior law enforcement sources say federal, state, and local authorities have uncovered evidence suggesting the two incidents may be connected, marking a major shift in the investigation. This contrasts with earlier statements from the FBI’s Boston field office, which said there appeared to be no connection. 

At Brown, the gunman killed Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov. Cook served as vice president of the Ivy League school’s College Republicans. In both cases, the shooting suspects remain at large.

“Nuno was not only a brilliant scientist, he was a brilliant person,” Dennis Whyte, a fellow MIT professor, wrote in an obituary posted by the university.

Whyte noted, “He shone a bright light as a mentor, friend, teacher, colleague and leader and was universally admired for his articulate, compassionate manner. His loss is immeasurable to our community at the PSFC, NSE and MIT, and around the entire fusion and plasma research world.”

By midweek, Israeli news publication The Jerusalem Post reported that Israeli officials were examining intelligence suggesting a possible Iranian connection to Loureiro’s shooting death. The outlet cautioned that the assessment has not been verified and is not supported at this stage by official findings from U.S. investigative authorities.

Separately, The Times of Israel published a blog post by journalist Rafael Baptista, who wrote:

Imagine having unlimited energy. Cheap, clean energy. What would that do to entrenched interests and powerful monopolies? Think of the hole it would blow in the fossil fuel industry. And national security? If I were a Putin or a Khamenei, I wouldn’t be happy about a technological leap coming from his research. Even Israeli authorities haven’t ruled out Iranian involvement. A breakthrough like this would leave such regimes permanently behind. It would redraw the balance of global power.

The strange shooting deaths occurred just days apart and less than an hour away from each other at two of America’s leading Ivy League schools.