A Custodian At Brown Says He Alerted Security After He Saw Gunman Case Campus ‘For Weeks’

A longtime custodian at Brown University said he alerted a security guard after seeing a suspicious man walking around campus at least 10 times in the weeks leading up to the mass shooting on December 13.

Derek Lisi told the Boston Globe on Sunday that 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves-Valente, who killed two students and wounded nine others, was peering into classrooms and pacing the college’s hallways weeks before his attack. Lisi said Valente was walking around the Barus and Holley engineering and physics building at Brown, where on December 13, the gunman opened fire, killing 19-year-old Ella Cook and 18-year-old Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov as they studied.

“He’d been casing that place for weeks,” Lisi said, adding, “I knew there was something off with him.”

Lisi said that he notified a staff member of a private firm who he believed was working as a security guard about a suspicious person on two different occasions, adding that the staff member did not investigate. Brown uses Event Staffing Services, a private firm that works security on campus. Event Staffing Services confirmed that one of its employees received a report of a suspicious person in December, but added that it is not responsible for investigating such reports, according to the Globe.

In the weeks before the shooting, the suspicious man was especially interested in room 166, according to Lisi. Room 166 is where the gunman shot multiple students days later.

“I thought it was someone trying to steal something,” Lisi said. “Every time he saw me, I think he thought I was security, because he would always walk away.”

Lisi said he recognized the suspicious man who had been walking around campus in the photos shared by police during the manhunt for the shooter. Providence, Rhode Island, police said that after the shooting, the custodian also told them that he had alerted campus security about man who appeared to have been casing campus.

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The Daily Wire reached out to Brown University for comment.

After hearing about the shooting at Brown, Lisi said he told a friend, “I hope it’s not the guy I’ve been seeing.” But after police release the first images and videos of a person of interest, Lisi knew immediately.

“I knew it was him because I could tell by the walk,” he said. “He had a pretty distinctive walk.”

Lisi wasn’t alone in witnessing odd behavior from the shooter. A Brown faculty member told police that she saw a car matching the description of the suspect’s rental car slowly driving around campus just before the shooting. Another man, whom police identified as “John,” said that he saw the suspect acting suspiciously on campus in the days before the attack.

Valente, a Portuguese resident and former Brown student, was finally tracked down by police five days after the shooting, and was found dead from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound inside a storage unit he owned in New Hampshire. Authorities believe that Valente was also responsible for the murder of MIT professor Nuno Loureiro, who was found shot in his Brookline, Massachusetts, home on the morning of December 15.