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.
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"