The man identified as the shooter, Claudio Neves Valente, is dead and questions about security and prior warnings are piling up after attacks at Brown University and elsewhere.

Claudio Neves Valente, 48, a Portuguese national and Brown alumnus, was found dead at a storage facility in Salem, New Hampshire, on December 18, five days after police say he opened fire inside Brown’s Barus and Holley engineering building. The December 13 attack left two people dead and nine wounded, and authorities say Valente also shot and killed MIT professor Nuno F.G. Loureiro on December 15 in Brookline, Massachusetts. Police and autopsy reports indicate Valente drove to the storage facility and took his own life the following day.

The central question for students and parents is how Valente got into the building. Initial statements from campus and local officials said the building was supposed to be secure, but details were sparse for days. University officials later said the space was unlocked because it was finals season, while students have pointed out the engineering building is often left open during study periods;

Adding to the concern, a longtime campus custodian reported seeing a man matching Valente’s appearance repeatedly in the weeks before the shooting and told campus security about the behavior, according to local reporting. The custodian said the man was pacing hallways, peering into classrooms, and lingering near one particular room, which prompted the staff member to pass the information along to on-campus security. This account raises questions about whether those observations were followed up in a way that might have prevented the later violence;

A Brown University custodian says he saw the alleged mass shooter, who opened fire in a classroom on Dec. 13, nearly a dozen times several weeks before the attack and shared suspicions about the man with an on-campus security guard.

Derek Lisi, who has worked at Brown for 15 years, said he had taken note of a man pacing the hallways, peering into classrooms, and ducking into a bathroom to avoid being seen.

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.

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Lisi said that, in mid-November, he told a security guard, who he believed worked for a private firm hired by the university, that he had seen a man “circling the hallways.” He said he wasn’t sure what the security guard did with the information.

Lisi said he continued seeing the man, who he said was peering into classrooms and hanging around outside Room 166 in particular.

“I thought it was someone trying to steal something,” Lisi said.

Other campus witnesses reported patterns that now look more ominous: a faculty member said a rental car later tied to Valente had been seen driving slowly around the engineering building in the days before the shooting. Those accounts together suggest activity that, in hindsight, could have prompted more aggressive follow-up. The custodian’s repeated observations, in particular, highlight a potential breakdown in the flow of information between frontline staff and whoever held responsibility for campus safety.

So far, neither the private security firm working on campus nor Brown’s administration has detailed what actions were taken after the custodian reported his concerns. The university has retained former United States Attorney for the District of Rhode Island Zachary Cunha to advise ahead of anticipated legal claims tied to the incident.

Officials will have to answer whether routine building access policies and the handling of suspicious-person reports left gaps that an attacker exploited. Students and employees expect secure study spaces, clear reporting channels, and timely follow-up when someone flags concerning behavior. Those are practical, everyday expectations that now face sharper scrutiny as investigators and civil attorneys examine what happened.

Moving forward, campus leaders and local authorities will need to lay out what warnings were received, what steps were taken, and what changes will be made to prevent a similar sequence of missed signals. Families and the campus community deserve clear, factual answers about the timeline and the decisions that followed the custodian’s reports and other early indicators.