A longtime Brown University janitor knows firsthand how little “if you see something, say something” matters — when no one’s listening.
According to a report published Monday in The Boston Globe, university custodian Derek Lisi saw something unusual in the weeks leading up to the murderous Dec. 13 shooting on the campus in Providence, Rhode Island.
He said something about it to a security guard on campus — twice.
But the warnings went unheeded. The man ended up shooting two students to death and wounding nine.
He’s also suspected of fatally shooting a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor on Dec. 15.
The newspaper reported that Lisi said he first saw the man, who turned about to be suspected gunman Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, in November.
He saw him repeatedly after that, behaving suspiciously, according to the report, “pacing the hallways, peering into classrooms, and ducking into a bathroom to avoid being seen.”
He said he reported the man to a security guard employed by Event Staffing Services, a contractor that provides some security work at Brown.
When he saw Neves Valente once in a university parking lot in December, Lisi said he went so far as to follow the man until Neves Valente ducked into a restroom.
“I said, ‘Something’s off with this guy, so I gotta say something,’” Lisi, a 15-year employee of the university, told The Boston Globe.
He said he reported the incident to the same ESS guard in December, according to the report. What happened after that is unclear, but if the newspaper’s report is anything to go by, it sounds like absolutely nothing.
That’s because, according to the newspaper, Event Staffing Services doesn’t investigate reports of suspicious behavior, carry weapons, or perform traditional jobs related to campus security guards or campus police.
“We have nothing to do with watching buildings,” ESS President David Madonna told the newspaper in an interview. “Whenever there’s an event at Brown, they hire us to do ID check and capacity counts in their rooms.”
Madonna even said that he’d spoken to an ESS employee who confirmed that Lisi had reported a man behaving suspiciously in December before the shooting, though he could not confirm Lisi’s statement that he also reported the man in November.
In any event, Madonna said, when ESS employees are faced with public safety issues, they advise Brown staff to call campus police. He said that’s what happened with Lisi’s report in December.
Lisi told the newspaper he thought he was talking to a campus security guard when he made the report. He said he finds the university’s use of third-party contractors confusing, and said he did not remember being told to call the campus police.
However, he said that after the shootings, when images of the shooter were being circulated, he contacted Providence police to tell them what he knew and advise them to look at footage from video cameras from specific days when he knew the suspected gunman had been on campus.
“I knew it was him because I could tell by the walk,” Lisi told The Boston Globe. “He had a pretty distinctive walk.”
But that’s all after the fact.
The gunman’s victims are dead or wounded. The gunman himself is dead, apparently at his own hand.
And any red flags now are all tragically moot.
“I just wish there was something I could have done,” Lisi told the newspaper.
Brown officials had not responded to The Boston Globe’s request for comment on Monday, according to the report.
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