A Brown University custodian says he repeatedly flagged a suspicious man on campus—only for that person to be later revealed as the gunman who carried out the shooting on campus that killed two students.
Derek Lisi works at the Engineering Research Center nearby where the shooting occurred. He told the Boston Globe and WPRI that he saw the shooter, later revealed to be Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, several times before the shooting, including once the day before Thanksgiving and another time in the evening on Dec. 1.
“Something kept telling me, ‘Don’t ignore it. Don’t ignore it,’” Lisi said.
“I knew there was something off with him,” he noted.
The school shooting, which claimed the lives of two Brown students and injured several others, occurred on Dec. 13. The gunman was also seen on video surveillance walking near campus the day before the shooting.
When police released videos and pictures of the suspect from surveillance footage, Lisi said he “dropped” as he recognized the man in the footage as the man he had reported. He called the tip line, which later set him up with a meeting with detectives.
“I told detectives, it was like I could see him and nobody else could — it is an eerie feeling,” Lisi explained. “It was the way he was browsing in the classrooms. He was like rolling his eyes one way, rolling his eyes another way. And it wasn’t just that classroom, it was all the classrooms.”
Lisi said he reported the suspicious individual to Event Staff Services LLC, or ESS, which acts as a third-party security vendor for the university, three separate times.
“Go with your gut,” Lisi said.
ESS president David Madonna told the Boston Globe that investigating reports of suspicious people is not part of the company’s job.
“We have nothing to do with watching buildings,” Madonna told the Globe. “Whenever there’s an event at Brown, they hire us to do ID check and capacity counts in their rooms.”
When asked by the Daily Beast for comment, Brown University pointed to its security measures assessment following the shooting.
Authorities said Neves Valente opened fire in a lecture hall where a study review was taking place around 4:00 pm on Dec. 13.
Investigators also believe he was behind the killing of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, who was fatally shot in his home in Brookline, Massachusetts, two days after the shooting at Brown.
After a five-day manhunt for the shooter, Neves Valente was found dead in a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire on Dec. 18.
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