[screye]

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

[SoftTalker]

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

[dmoy]

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).

[socketcluster]

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...

[screye]

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