MIT professor shot at his Massachusetts home dies | Hacker News Reader

MIT professor shot at his Massachusetts home dies

bbc.com

270 pointsmosura216 comments

Is it true that Brookline had very few murders in the past 5 years? Increases the chance of it being targeted instead of random.

It is a very very safe town.

I lived around that area for 3 years. Never heard of any shooting in that neighborhood.

Brookline was rated Best Places to Live for Quality of Life in the U.S. in 2025-2026 by US News which "measures how satisfied residents are with their daily lives, and takes into account factors like crime, quality and availability of health care, quality of education and average commute time"

I also live nearby.

This is his ORCID profile, which lists his grants and published works:

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9755-6563

> Correction 16 December: An earlier version of this story incorrectly defined the kind of plasma that Professor Loureiro researched.

If I get shot and someone writes some libelous bullshit about how I worked with hygienic macro systems, someone kindly jump on that shit ASAP. Thanks in advance!

Would you want your epitaph to say that you worked on implementing dynamic scoping rules?

Here's the local Boston news reporting on it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmbmBNre5SQ

Could this be related to the Brown shooting?

From ABC -

"Authorities have investigated whether his death could be connected to this weekend's Brown University shooting and, at this point, a senior law enforcement official briefed on both cases told ABC News there is nothing to suggest they’re connected."

https://abcnews.go.com/US/mit-professor-shot-killed-home-bos...

Absolutely useless without a name and reputation on the line. It's an absurd to publish that multiple academics killed within an hour drive within one week have "nothing to suggest they're connected".

Are you from Boston / have you lived there? I do, and thank you for your concern. But this is confusing to say the least.

1. No one should be stupid enough to put their name and rep on the line, in a fluid situation, where there’s 0 idea who did the first anyways, for days now.

2. Dunno what you mean by academics, students and professors? Usually academics refers to professors / grad students / has a job at university related to teaching, but Brown victims weren’t professors. Hard to see how that indicates a connection.

3. It’s a real stretch to put Providence to Brookline at a 1 hour drive. In general, it’s two different worlds, so it’s strange to use it as a clear indicator they must be related.

4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?

You are demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of trust. Aaron Katersky and Josh Margolin put their name on the line because without that you wouldn't know the provenance of the information and wouldn't know if you should trust it. Citing an unnamed officer making claims that they have insufficient evidence for is not good journalism, so their reputation takes a hit. The officer also deserves this reputational hit since they are making the unsubstantiated claim.

To be very clear here, the claim is that "there is nothing to suggest the two sets of predmeditated murders within a week within an hour are related". The fact that they're the same demographic, high profile, using the same weapon, close in proximity, and close in time are all concrete things that relate them. It is embarrassing to state otherwise, so the officer was not named. However the reporters are not immune to this, so they take the hit.

I am not stating the positive "they are related", I am refuting the negative "they are unrelated".

And as for my identity: I am not a reporter or public official. You don't need to and shouldn't use me as a source of truth. I am a member of the public applying logic to facts. I am closer to this event than you but I won't say more. As a member of HN who respects privacy I'm sure that should be enough for you.

> using the same weapon

The same weapon being.. a gun? Hardly a notable connection.

You aren’t refuting a negative because the statement isn’t “they are unrelated” the statement is “(with current information) there is nothing suggesting they are related”

If you’re close to the situation, and have a substantiated reason to believe the claim that there’s no current information suggesting they’re related is inaccurate, you should be able to back that up. Except we both know you can’t, because you’re attempting to refute something that wasn’t actually said.

Other comments cover the “logic” being applied here. Dunno who those two names are. I’m genuinely worried about your grip on reality based on your writing, I don’t say that lightly and am very, very, serious, to the point I’d prefer to eat downvotes and offend you than hide that and possibly contribute to you worsening.

I hope you’re extremely close to one of these events and are extremely distraught, even though that’s tragic, because it would indicate you’re not just comfortable disassociated from reality.

Note the difference in your approach this morning versus now, to wit, you this morning: “ We have no info but he was the department head of the MIT PSFC. It's easy to imagine a deranged individual picking a high profile target by browsing MIT's website. Or it was a domestic dispute or road rage or any number of things that would drive someone to shoot someone in their home. We have no information and can only speculate.”

The gaslighting is touching, but I hadn't had a mental shift between the morning and evening. I had a big response to a public official lying. The right answer (and officers that were on the record actually said this on Tuesday) that "all options are on the table". You'll see from subsequent statements today that ABC's prior publishing of the statement that "there is nothing that suggests the Brown University and MIT murders are related" was baseless and untrue.

Not only did the public official lie, but was given voice and reputational cover by ABC. This is deserving of the criticism I give it.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/brown-mass-shooting-mit-professor-...

"Gaslighting" - I came back to note you were right. Also, you weren't being gaslit, and you were incoherent. You could have replied to any one of us with anything explaining yourself and didn't. Like, the same weapon one was especially bizarre. Note that "No indication" is same as "all options are on the table", as was repeatedly noted to you.

>4. If it’s obvious they’re connected, and making any claim of probability re: their connection should require putting your name and reputation on the line, what’s your name?

Steve Lookner?

  authorities believe Brown University shooter used rented vehicle that is same make and model of car connected to killing of MIT professor"

https://x.com/lookner/status/2001763177185579260

Authorities and the university have also been asking for tips but then flipping the script as soon as they get them: "Accusations, speculation and conspiracies we're seeing on social media and in some news reports are irresponsible, harmful, and in some cases dangerous."[]

Also worth noting... at one point the arrested the wrong guy.

They have no clue. And become hostile when people try to come up with one. While scrubbing student profiles and simultaneously claiming they have no knowledge of doing so. The whole thing is a total clown show and nothing said by the authorities is to be believed without independent verification.

[] Brown University spokesperson Brian Clark

Without further context, I don’t blame them for being hostile towards “Accusations, speculation and conspiracies…on social media and in some news reports”. Remember the Boston bombing? Tips shouldn’t be public.

Well maybe they should have been a bit more open to "conspiracies" since they're now saying they think they're connected and that they found a link of the same make/model car at both. Seeing as the "homeless guy" who remembered the plate was seemingly ignored for 5 days, he should have just blasted it on X.

Fortunately at least one person on reddit posted about the car 2 days ago ( https://old.reddit.com/r/providence/comments/1pnkwoq/fbi_pos... ) posted it, since it seems to be one of the few ways to get heard.

Update:

The murder was solved due to a post to reddit

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/G8giswDXoAAV-Cp?format=png&name=...

Tips should be "public" in this case because that's the only way they get noticed enough to garner attention. Wouldn't surprise me if "homeless man" was ignored by the cops if he tried earlier, or "homeless man" was too afraid to approach them directly because of how cops treat the homeless.

They're only 40 miles apart. Moreover, they're both (apparently) premeditated gun murders targeting academics at famous universities.

edit to add: (For those who weren't aware, the Brown University terrorist is still on the loose).

One was a home invasion that may or may not be related to the victims work on fusion plasma. It is very likely unrelated to that work.

The other was a mass shooting style event that targetted an exam preperation review hall populated by econ students and led by a 21-year-old teaching assistant.

It's a stretch to connect an isolated murder of a field advancing physics researcher and a hall full of students just because all the victims are involved in book learning.

Possible connection, sure. At an improbable stretch.

ChatGPT can certainly knock up a Clancy like novel here, no doubt.

Is there any evidence this murder was related to the professor's work?

put another way, is there any sort of proof that this guy wasn't banging his neighbour's wife, or embezzling funds, or otherwise doing something shady?

In a different state, no less.

My understanding is that the border security between those states is rather lax.

On the off-chance that someone believes that there is border security between US states but that these states are an exception.

The US doesn't have border security between states.

The closest thing to an exception is the "don't bring agricultural products into California" stations. However, there's a bypass lane for folks who stayed within 10 miles of the border, and no one checks whether someone is using that lane inappropriately.

Thank you. I dropped this: /s

The distance between Providence & Brookline is only slightly further than the distance between Dallas & Fort Worth. New England states are tiny.

If it is, do you think it’s the Iranians taking revenge on American civilian scientists, or a Ted Kaczynski type?

This is my theory as well. A google search for the late prof's name returns a .ir website at the top of the result for some reason. It's a tragic loss for the world and his loved ones as are the victims of the brown incident.

My apologies for dismissing this a couple of days ago.

No need to apologize! It was totally rational to assume that these two events were unrelated. It is a wild sad story and we'll likely learn about the motive over the coming weeks. This story hit me particularly hard as I live about a 3 minute walk from the victim's house in the Brookline area.

My prediction is that it was a random home invasion robbery committed by someone with multiple previous felonies who had no idea that the person living in the house they were trying to rob was a MIT professor.

But I have no more information than anyone else does, I'm making a low-confidence educated guess, and at some point in the near future it's very likely that the professionals whose job it is to investigate serious crimes will have a better idea of what actually happened than anyone posting in this thread.

It's a reasonable guess, but 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery. Usually they're committed during the day when people are at work, and if not that then deep in the night for maximum cover. 8:30 is almost like the ideal time if you actually want someone to be there and answer the door at an hour where it wouldn't cause enough alarm for them to answer the door with a weapon.

When it comes to small-scale crime like this, the smartest thing is typically not to do it at all. So the people who do it will generally not be very smart.

Indeed, 8:30p is no different from 2p or 10a for the act.

It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.

> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.

The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.

Fewer crimes are committed when the weather is bad since criminals avoid going out like everyone else.

It's a fantasy that strongly correlates with facts. Home robberies are not evenly committed throughout the day.

In this day and age who robs homes any more? You'd be liable to get paid to take a bunch of junk away instead

When BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) came to Pleasanton CA my fox-news brainwashed racist aunt and uncle and their neighbors where legitimately convinced black people from Oakland were going to come take BART out from Oakland and steal their TVs. And this was back in the day of the giant bulky heavy-backed rear-projection TVs. I was like... first of all they drive cars now and second of all who is going to take BART to come rob you and third of all who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing!! And if they were going to take your 150lb TV they would need a truck and a dolly, not take public transit to do so.

Pleasanton remained safe and bland despite allowing evil public transit.

> who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing

BART service started in Pleasanton in 1997. In 1992 or 1993 I had a glass CRT TV stolen during a burglary at our house in exurban Connecticut. There's no reason to claim that TV theft is some myth. It was a crime that did in fact happen.

Ummm... Something tells me they didn't take the train to come steal your TV.

the did not, no. That's why I did not address that part of the comment, only the part claiming that no miscreant would want to carry a heavy TV.

The spirit of my comment is that they wouldn't take public transit to come steal TVs because nobody would intentionally schlep a giant stolen tv via public transit, they most likely would use cars.

yeah it turns out everyone else read the end of that sentence one way and I went the other. Although the image of a train car full of straphanger burglars with a tube TV between their legs, reading a newspaper folded into 1/8ths with their free hands is kind of funny.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304608

Did the thief take transit, though? We had a similar NIMBY argument in the area where some totally-not-racist people said thieves were going to bike from a predominantly black neighborhood 15 miles away to steal TVs, and it was so blatantly wrong that the local chief of police noted that the burglars they catch use stolen trucks or SUVs for the cargo capacity.

I only addressed "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing" because that's the only part of the comment I objected to. By now it seems like everyone is reading it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing for the duration of a light rail ride" whereas I read it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing at all" and I'm the odd one out.

The little but wealthy town of Los Altos Hills next to Palo Alto had Flock come in and install their camera surveillance after a string of burglaries and one or two home invasion style robberies, it's a mostly rural/suburban area. Believe it or not there are also still folks who come from cultures where they do not believe in banks in the USA, so there is a lot of cash and gold in those people's homes.

> small-scale crime like this

You mean murder?

Unlikely. He was killed in the foyer [1] of his building in an exceedingly safe city (Brookline, MA).

In a neighborhood with mixed SFHs and condos, it makes little sense to target a condo. Makes even less sense for someone to break in, but to shoot the victim outside, in the foyer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmbmBNre5SQ

Agree. Most killings are not random, but committed by someone the victim knows.

Yea even in the US where there's a rather lot of home invasions (~million/yr), even amongst the ones where the occupier is injured-or-worse (~250k/yr), very very few of them are fatal (<500/yr).

Other possibility; a disgruntled investor who poured millions into dead-end fusion research and now wishes they had invested in AI research instead? Blames the professor for persuading them to invest in fusion.

It's a tough one to find a motive for...

Can you quote 1 other example of a disgruntled investor that has killed an American academic over the last 50 years ?

They normally just have their friend the DA lock them up for "fraud"

This basically never happens, about 100 people die a year in the US during a “burglary gone wrong”. People think it’s common, though; it’s the go-to cover story in almost any Dateline episode.

That's 100 times more than I thought.

The us has a population of about 340,000,100. Notice where the 1 is.

Tangential but I think that's a terrible way of making your point because intuitively we don't look at digits of a numbers and think log scale. That looks more like 1/3 instead of 0.000029%.

You thought only one person a year died during break ins gone wrong? Vending machines kill more than that.

Legalizing vending-machine concealed carry was our first mistake.

you f around with a vending machine and it will f back... usually by falling on the poor shmuck

Genuinely believing that only one person in America dies in a home invasion is hard to take seriously.

I imagine most preteens in America have a better grasp of reality than the one you’re espousing here.

I just checked UK stats and from my reading of ONS's homicide data it's entirely possible it's around zero from burglary gone wrong.

The us is only 5 times bigger

IIRC hand guns are slightly harder to obtain in the UK. And also slightly less legal for civilians to own.

It could be a disgruntled grad student? That is shockingly not unheard of in academia.

If we are doing random predictions based on scant evidence, mine is a professional hit. Neighbor said he heard 3 shots. If it was a "pop pop...pop", that's 2 in the body, 1 in the head. Professional assassin.

My prediction: time traveler. Guy goes back in time to prevent an unspeakable tragedy that happened in the future. The simplest solution to alter the course of human history was this attack. We'll never find the killer because as soon as his work was completed, he vaporized into the ether as his timeline was culled.

Wish that guy had … well, never mind. Better not to say it.

I don't see how it plausibly could be anything else.

I would assume that the most likely options for for "rich person shot in home" are:

* Drug dealer

* Cheating on spouse and someone got jealous

* Suicide

* Drug-addled family member with a history of violence.

It’s someone he knew. Either a family member or jilted lover. That’s what it always ends up being.

Someone he knew had a grudge. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/person-of-interest-arr...

Earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46292708

I'd made another post (that I can't reply to) pointing to an Israeli news article that Nuno Loureiro was Jewish. Apparently, he was not, so please note the correction here.

To those who say that being Jewish would NOT have been a motivation for some in the world: stop evading reality. Especially so soon after the Bondi beach massacre.

Flagged. The post is about someone just murdered, yet most of the HN comments on this post are strangely insensitive and dumb. HN ranks highly in Google, so friends and family members may see these comments.

>"The theoretical physicist and fusion scientist was known for his award-winning research in magnetised plasma dynamics.
Magnetised plasma dynamics is the study of the state of matter in which the motion of charged particles is influenced by the presence of an external magnetic field, according to Nature.

Loureiro joined MIT's faculty in 2016 and was named director of MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center in 2024."

Although it may be a total red herring, it may be worth noting that there are (debatably pseudoscientific) theories -- primarily Plasma cosmology[1] and the Electric Universe theory[2] -- that are related to (and potentially in conflict with) this field of research.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_cosmology

2: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Electric_Universe

Pros always use silencers - but amateurs instigated/inspired by security services/spies, are meant to be caught and will confess

Turn off the TV and go to bed. Silencers don't silence guns. It's an expensive piece of evidence of limited usefulness.

Also, jewel thieves don't abseil down from the ceiling.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com