Just before Thanksgiving, Claudio Neves Valente checked into a Boston hotel and traveled to Brown University, where he had studied physics 25 years earlier.
The drive to Providence was short, and in the days that followed, the 48-year-old Portuguese national returned to the campus again and again. On most trips, he drifted around Brown and the surrounding neighborhoods in a gray Nissan rental car with Florida plates. A custodian noticed him inside an engineering building while most students were home on the holiday break and spotted him again three days later, according to authorities.
