BOSTON — Tensions are running high in the normally sleepy Brookline neighborhood where an MIT professor was fatally shot Monday. Officials have yet to give an update on a suspect in the killing.

Nuno F.G. Loureiro, 47, was shot multiple times in his Gibbs Street home Monday and died at an area hospital the next morning. According to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Loureiro was a professor there as well as the director of the school’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center.

Norfolk DA spokesperson David Linton told The Herald Thursday, “The Brookline homicide is an active and ongoing investigation.”

“In order to protect the integrity of the investigation, we are limited in the information we can share at this time and ask for the community’s understanding and patience,” Brookline Police Chief Jennifer Paster said in a statement the day before. “While we investigate this incident, we will have dedicated patrol cars, officers, and unmarked units in the Gibbs Street neighborhood.”

There was no visible police presence on Loureiro’s street Thursday afternoon. A memorial of flowers and candles had formed on the stoop of the building where Loureiro was shot.

Some neighbors seemed to be going about their business as usual: a few people were walking their dogs, groups of kids walked home from school, and one house down the street from Loureiro’s apartment building had their door propped open.

But others said the homicide had shaken them.

“It’s very scary,” a mother helping her kids out of a minivan told The Herald. She said she’d driven her kids home from school that day because they were scared to walk.

A pair of college students home for winter break said that their parents were concerned about them walking in the area, which is wedged between Coolidge Corner and the Brookline-Boston line.

Maddie McLaughlin, a college sophomore, said that her parents initially didn’t want her to come home for break because they were nervous about the killing.

Her friend and fellow college student Sophia Perucchi said that the area was a type of place where people left things out on the porch and left their doors opened or at least unlocked.

Coming off of a fatal shooting at Brown over the weekend — that investigators say may be connected to the death of the professor — both said the violence shouldn’t be what they have to focus on this week.

Perucchi said that rather than being worried about shootings, students should be spending the end of the semester worried about finals. “We should be worried about orgo (organic chemistry),” she said.

A local college student named Genevieve, who lives in the area and asked to only use her first name, said that Loureiro’s death was really unexpected and scary.

“My heart goes out to his family,” she said. On the night of the shooting she said she and her friends heard the ambulance come from her building two minutes away.

From the apartment where the shrine to Professor Loureiro had formed, a group of children emerged from the front door in the early afternoon. They started to walk out of the building, before turning back and waiting in the foyer for the adult following them out.

The man chaperoning the kids declined to speak with the Herald, saying he was taking the group of them out for a walk.

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