Brown University janitor claims he caught shooting suspect lurking and university did nothing

A Brown University janitor said he noticed suspicious behavior of the Dec. 13 campus shooting suspect nearly a dozen times over the weeks leading up to the fatal attack.

Derek Lisi, who has served as a custodian at Brown University for 15 years, claims he saw now-deceased Portuguese national Claudio Neves Valente, 48, “pacing the hallways, peering into classrooms, and ducking into a bathroom to avoid being seen,” according to a Tuesday Boston Globe report.

“I had caught him the last time on Dec. 1, and I was right behind him as he was coming in the building,” Lisi said in a recent interview. “I was coming back for my break, and I went right to the [Event Staffing Services] staff and I had said to the ESS staff member, ‘Hey, this guy looks suspicious … He just went in the bathroom, you should go check him out.’ He’s like, ‘I’m not here for that.’”

On Dec. 13, Neves Valente allegedly opened fire at Brown University in Providence, R.I., killing two students and wounding nine others. He also allegedly killed Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Nuno Loureiro at Loureiro’s home in Brookline, Mass. two days after the Brown shooting.

Neves Valente was found dead with gunshot wound to the head on Dec. 18 after a five day manhunt. Autopsy results released the following day confirmed the manner of death was suicide.

Lisi claims that he told campus security twice about a suspicious person entering campus buildings, according to the Boston Globe report. ESS confirmed that a custodian had told one of its employees about the suspicious activity, but “said it doesn’t investigate reports like that.”

“We have nothing to do with watching buildings,” said David Madonna, ESS’s president, in an interview Monday, per the Boston Globe. “Whenever there’s an event at Brown, they hire us to do ID check and capacity counts in their rooms.”

Lisi told the Globe that the “patchwork of third-party firms at Brown can be confusing.”

Further, an anonymous tipster only identified as “John” claimed to have witnessed suspicious activity before the Dec. 13 attack, and even chased a suspect on foot, according to the Globe. Following this tip, authorities located a rental car where the suspect was discovered, having died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

“I told my friend, ‘I hope it’s not the guy I’ve been seeing. I hope it’s not,’” Lisi said, according to the Globe. After seeing photos of the suspect, though, Lisi says he recognized the man immediately. “I knew it was him because I could tell by the walk,” Lisi told the Globe. “He had a pretty distinctive walk.”

Lisi then called a tip line and pointed authorities toward two incidents when he had seen the suspect.

“I just did it for the safety of the students. That’s primarily what I care about,” Lisi told the Boston Globe. “It’s about making sure that they learn from this and that it doesn’t happen again.”

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