Days after an MIT professor was gunned down in his Brookline home, there was little sign of the violence that occurred in the quiet neighborhood early Thursday evening.
But a small makeshift memorial remained outside the apartment building at 9 Gibbs St., where Nuno F.G. Loureiro was shot on Monday night. A few candles lined the steps leading up to the building, and a small bundle of flowers lay on the top step.
A neighbor in the building next to Loureiro’s described the MIT professor as a “great man.”
“He didn’t deserve it,” the neighbor, who declined to give his name to a MassLive reporter, said as he went into his apartment Thursday night.
Police went to Loureiro’s apartment around 8:30 p.m. on Monday after receiving 911 calls reporting gunshots. They found Loureiro in the foyer with multiple gunshot wounds. He was rushed to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead on Tuesday morning.
Loureiro, who was married, worked as the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at MIT, where he was a professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering.
The light was still on in the first-floor apartment where he lived Thursday evening and children’s art could be seen on the wall, with family photos lining a shelf visible from the street.
A 12-year-old who lived in the neighborhood said she knew Loureiro’s daughter.
“She doesn’t deserve it,” she said. “She’s really sweet.”
The president of MIT, Sally Kornbluth, said in a statement that the killing was a “shocking loss.” The office of Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa also put out a condolence statement calling Loureiro’s death “an irreparable loss for science and for all those with whom he worked and lived.”
Loureiro had said he hoped his work would shape the future.
“It’s not hyperbole to say MIT is where you go to find solutions to humanity’s biggest problems,” Loureiro said when he was named to lead the plasma science lab last year. “Fusion energy will change the course of human history.”
The Brookline apartment where Loureiro lived is less than half a mile from an elementary school, in the middle of a quiet, suburban neighborhood.
Neighbors said they were surprised by the outburst of violence.
“This is probably the safest neighborhood I can imagine living in,” said Michael Schreiber, who lives around the corner at 106 Beals St. and was out walking his dog on Thursday evening.
To Schreiber, the fact that Loureiro’s killing now appears to be linked to Saturday night’s mass shooting at Brown University and may not be random is reassuring.
Still, “the fact that there’s violence across the street is unsettling,” he said, noting he had lived in Brookline for 30 years.
Schreiber said he didn’t know Loureiro or his family.
“The world has become very absurd,” he said.
Another neighbor, who said her friend’s children attend school with Loureiro’s children, stopped by to leave a candle outside the apartment building.
While she didn’t know the family, she said the entire neighborhood is close.
“It’s really shocking,” said the neighbor, who also spoke to MassLive Thursday on the condition of anonymity.
Ethan Wright, 31, who lives at 30 Gibbs St. on the other end of the block, said he didn’t feel like he or the neighborhood was in more danger following the shooting, even though no formal arrests have been announced.
The shooting, he said, “had something to do with the professor, not the neighborhood.”
Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.