The suspicious actor turned out to be the gunman
Brown University’s head of public safety, Rodney Chatman, was placed on administrative leave Monday after a janitor revealed that he saw a suspicious person lurking around campus in the weeks leading up to the December 13 shooting—a person who ended up being the gunman, Claudio Manuel Neves Valente.
The move was included in an email announcing that Brown was launching an external after-action review into the shooting, “including a complete assessment and evaluation of campus safety in the period leading up to the tragedy, the preparedness and response on the date of the shooting, and the emergency management response in the aftermath.” It called the review “a standard part of recovery and response following a mass casualty event” and added that it was also conducting a separate campus safety assessment.
Both Brown and Providence authorities faced significant criticism over their response to the shooting, which killed two people and injured nine. The university waited nearly 20 minutes before sending out an emergency alert and never sounded its sirens. Chatman himself is no stranger to scrutiny, having faced two votes of no confidence this year, and officers accused him of ignoring complaints that his department had failed to adequately respond to shooting and bomb threats. He joined Brown in 2021 after his predecessor resigned amid calls from student activists to abolish police.
On Monday, Brown janitor Derek Lisi told the Boston Globe that in the weeks leading up to the December 13 shooting, he saw a suspicious person nearly a dozen times “circling the hallways,” peering into classrooms, and hiding in bathrooms to avoid being noticed. Lisi believed the individual was trying to steal something, noting that the person paid attention to one room in particular. That room, it later turned out, was where Neves Valente carried out his attack.
“He’d been casing that place for weeks,” Lisi said. “I knew there was something off with him.”
Lisi said he alerted personnel with Event Staffing Services, a Brown contractor that staffs events, of the suspicious person, first in mid-November and again in early December, believing the staffers were security guards. Event Staffing Services president David Madonna told the Globe that his employees are unarmed, are not responsible for providing building security, and tell Brown staff to call campus police if a public safety concern arises. He added that at least one person Lisi warned did exactly that.
Lisi said he couldn’t remember if an Event Staffing Services staffer told him to call police, adding that Brown’s patchwork of third-party contractors is confusing. He has worked at the university for 15 years.
After the December 13 shooting, police didn’t release images or video of the suspect for two days. Lisi immediately recognized the gunman as the suspicious person he’d seen on campus. He called the tip line, which also wasn’t established until December 15, said he’d seen the suspect, and suggested that investigators look for security footage on two days in particular.
“I knew it was him because I could tell by the walk,” Lisi said. “He had a pretty distinctive walk.”
Police interviewed him that night, right around when Neves Valente shot Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, Nuno Loureiro, in Brookline, Mass. Loureiro died days later. Neves Valente killed himself some 80 miles from Brown’s campus, with an autopsy finding that he died two days before police found him.
Still, Brown president Christina Paxson in a Friday message to students made no apologies for the school’s handling of the emergency, instead praising police. She again highlighted praise for Chatman’s department on Monday.
The university has retained former federal prosecutor Zachary Cunha as it prepares for potential lawsuits, Fox News reported.
Brown did not respond to a request for comment.
