A Brown University custodian says he noticed a man he believed was acting strangely in the weeks leading up to the mass shooting that left two students dead and others injured.
Authorities allege that the suspect, Claudio Neves Valente, 48, opened fire on Brown’s campus in Providence, R.I., on Dec. 13.
Investigators also believe Neves Valente was responsible for the killing of Nuno Loureiro, an MIT professor who was found fatally shot inside his home in Brookline, Mass., two days later.
Derek Lisi, who has worked as a custodian at Brown for more than a decade, told The Boston Globe and WPRI that he saw a man matching the suspect’s description multiple times and said he raised concerns with a campus security guard before the shooting.
“He’d been casing that place for weeks,” Lisi told The Globe.
Lisi said he first noticed the man in November, claiming he saw him several times walking around the building where the shooting later occurred. He described the person’s clothing as consistent with what authorities later cited in the suspect description.
“I knew there was something off with him,” Lisi said, according to the newspaper.
Lisi also said he alerted a security guard twice about the person he believed looked suspicious.
On one day in December, Lisi told the paper he decided to follow the man after spotting him in a parking lot. He claimed the man noticed him, then hurried away and entered a bathroom.
“I said, ‘Something’s off with this guy, so I gotta say something,’” Lisi said, according to The Globe.
Officials identified the two students killed in the attack as Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov and Ella Cook.
Authorities said Neves Valente, a Portuguese national, attended Brown in the early 2000s but did not graduate.
The New York Times previously reported that investigators believe Neves Valente and Loureiro — also a Portuguese national — knew each other and studied together in Lisbon.
Neves Valente was found dead in a storage unit in Salem, N.H., on Thursday, Dec. 18, following an extensive manhunt.
