Brown U. Custodian Claims He Warned Security Twice About Suspected Gunman

Brown U. Custodian Claims He Warned Security Twice About Suspected Gunman

Derek Lisi, a custodian at Brown University, told The Boston Globe that he warned campus security many times about a man casing the engineering building weeks before the shooting.

That man?

Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, the alleged shooter.

Lisi saw the “man pacing the hallways, peering into classrooms, and ducking into a bathroom to avoid being seen.”

Where did Lisi see the man?

Hanging around Room 166, where the shooting took place on Saturday, December 13.

Neves Valente allegedly killed Ella Cook and Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and injured nine others.

In November, Lisi told someone he believed worked as a security guard through Event Staffing Services (ESS) about “a man ‘circling the hallways.'”

Lisi did not know what the person did with his information.

However, The Boston Globe reported that “one of its employees received a report about a suspicious person in the building in December.”

Lisi’s suspicions heightened in December:

Lisi said his suspicions about the man he had been seeing in the building grew in early December when, one day, Lisi said he decided to follow the man after seeing him in a parking lot.

When the man saw him, Lisi said, the man started walking away quickly and ducked into the bathroom.

“I said, ‘Something’s off with this guy, so I gotta say something,’” he recalls.

So he said he flagged down the same staff member again. According to Lisi, the person didn’t investigate.

Providence police confirmed Lisi told them after the shootings that he had alerted a security guard about his suspicions.

From The Boston Globe:

He later recognized him in the photos shared by police of the man they say killed two people and injured nine others on Saturday, Dec. 13.

“He’d been casing that place for weeks,” Lisi said in an interview Sunday.

Lisi, who has not been identified publicly until now, said he had seen a man matching the description of the suspect and wearing the same clothes in and around Brown’s Barus and Holley engineering and physics building on about 10 occasions beginning in early November.

“I knew there was something off with him,” Lisi said.

Lisi told security about the suspicious man twice.

I cannot stress this enough. ALWAYS trust your gut. It is your natural defense mechanism.

Lisi recognized everything:

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

Lisi said he also recognized the jacket and dark clothing the man had been wearing on campus. The only difference was that he remembered seeing him in a blue face mask, not a black one.

Here’s where I raised my eyebrows. Remember how we never got footage from the school? Yeah (emphasis mine):

He called the public tip line that night and told police to look for security footage of the man in the building on two days in particular, when he was certain he had seen him.

Where is that footage?

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