RI - Mass Shooting at Brown University - Providence 13 Dec 2025

[TristanP]

Brown contractor Event Staffing Services confirmed that one of its employees did receive a report about a suspicious person in December, but said it is not responsible for investigating such reports.

You would think that a Brown University employee would know to report this kind of thing to campus law enforcement. Unless maybe the Brown University employee wasn't a permanent employee or something like that.

Or at the very least, they would know to tell the janitor to contact campus police to report it instead.

 

[Charlot123]

I don’t know the reporting structure, but if I am reading local news correctly, the custodian reported not to a Brown security guard or campus police, but to an external firm hired for an event. That would be different from reporting to a Brown employee or the security guard typically staffing a front desk at the buildings that have that position.

https://www.wpri.com/news/local-news/providence/dont-ignore-it-brown-university-custodian-says-he-reported-gunman-multiple-times-before-shooting/

But there is some obvious lack of common sense in the sutuation. A security guard said they were hired to watch the event but not the building. But the event is located in the building! If someone, God forbid, decides to blow up something in the building, or shoot outside the event hall but hit the outgoing participants, it does become the hired security's responsibility, immediately! If you are hired to "stay in the door and watch those walking in and out", then someone from the company has to check the part outside the hall and definitely have a connection with the campus police, just for such cases. Otherwise it looks (and seems to be the case) that the external security company provides talking mannequins. Sorry.

 

[wallflowery2]

But there is some obvious lack of common sense in the sutuation. A security guard said they were hired to watch the event but not the building. But the event is located in the building! If someone, God forbid, decides to blow up something in the building, or shoot outside the event hall but hit the outgoing participants, it does become the hired security's responsibility, immediately! If you are hired to "stay in the door and watch those walking in and out", then someone from the company has to check the part outside the hall and definitely have a connection with the campus police, just for such cases. Otherwise it looks (and seems to be the case) that the external security company provides talking mannequins. Sorry.

If there was someone elsewhere in the building who shouldn’t be there, but wasn’t trying to enter the event they were hired to staff, they may not have understood the risk in the moment. Hindsight makes the threat clear, but it’s common for unknown members of the community and visitors to be in academic buildings. That said, I agree they ought to have escalated it and/or communicated better with the janitor who reported. I’m sure this will be part of the after-event review underway.

Brown contractor Event Staffing Services confirmed that one of its employees did receive a report about a suspicious person in December, but said it is not responsible for investigating such reports.

You would think that a Brown University employee would know to report this kind of thing to campus law enforcement. Unless maybe the Brown University employee wasn't a permanent employee or something like that.

He may not have known that a contractor hired for an event isn’t a Brown employee.

 

[99cats]

This article gives a little more background on the Janitor's involvement. He reported CV three times to no avail. I wonder if Brown staff are instructed to contact the third party security contractors, since it seems like he tried awfully hard to flag the suspicious behavior.

Lisi said he reported the individual as suspicious to Event Staff Services LLC, or ESS — a third-party security vendor for Brown — on three separate occasions.

Also of note:

After police released photos of the suspect captured on surveillance video, Lisi said he “dropped” because he recognized the man he had been hoping wasn’t the suspect. He immediately called the tip line, which led to him later meeting with detectives Dec. 15 to describe what he witnessed.

So it sounds like LE probably had a good idea of who they were looking for (perhaps a sketch?) fairly early on.

I do really feel for Lisi - it seems like he had great instincts that something was wrong, went out of his way to notify someone.. and then no further action was taken. This quote really got me:

“I told detectives, it was like I could see him and nobody else could — it is an eerie feeling,” Lisi explained.

 

[dlerrahlk1130]

Just a reminder about one of the victims. We know her family and just want to honor her memory here as we discuss the murderer.

Ella Cook left a legacy of love and ‘quiet gravity’: Mountain Brook says farewell to teen killed in mass shooting

The Brown University sophomore was affectionately known as “Ella-bama.”

www.al.com

 

[Charlot123]

Maybe he was a gambler/poker player? Physics folks are math whizzes and can calculate probabilities pretty efficiently.

I am not sure if the book “Bringing down the House” wasn’t sponsored by the casinos because it showed them stupid in contrast to a group of MIT geniuses. Great attraction for new clients, lol.

But it would be interesting to find out how long Claudio stayed in Vegas. Maybe long enough to “start training” and lose all the money in the process?

 

[Charlot123]

This article gives a little more background on the Janitor's involvement. He reported CV three times to no avail. I wonder if Brown staff are instructed to contact the third party security contractors, since it seems like he tried awfully hard to flag the suspicious behavior.

Also of note:

So it sounds like LE probably had a good idea of who they were looking for (perhaps a sketch?) fairly early on.

I do really feel for Lisi - it seems like he had great instincts that something was wrong, went out of his way to notify someone.. and then no further action was taken. This quote really got me:

Lisi said that the person he saw (CV) was “visible” to him and yet not to the security. It makes a lot of sense.

The “algorithms” that we use to determine "in" or "out" depend on our oikos. (This Ancient Greek word used to mean “household” and today, it means “relational sphere” and “sphere of influence”.)

So for the janitor, the oikos at Brown is the physical building plus, the students and the professors. He saw someone who “didn’t belong to his oikos”. For the janitor, Valente was the “extra” factor.

Same with John. John was unhoused former Brown student. So his oikos was all Brown + people+ the area around it, and the man’s he saw fit neither. (He even looked into CV’s car).

What is the security man’s oikos?
He is probably looking for some kind of a terrorist, a menace. I don’t know what he’d look for professionally, but probably, the outline of a gun, maybe they scan purses. However, the fact that CV looks neither like a student nor like a teacher (or even a parent) escapes him. In the security’s world, If CV doesn’t have a gun on him (I suspect that he didn’t on that day), he fits in.

Possibly, for the security, CV who has the aura of a "mad scientist" can probably pass for one, but he deceived neither Derek nor John. In this context, it is interesting that John described CV’s clothes as being from Walmart (and it was not judgmental.) To guess what John thought: students from Brown dress on a budget, but they don’t shop for clothes in Walmart.

JMO: the security indeed didn’t see CV but it doesn’t mean that they are bad “security watchers”. They just made a wrong assumption. From their self-contained perspective, they were dismissive of the "insider" Lisi's information.

Two weeks later, all the security was asking the public to help. Sad, indeed.

So I feel for Lisi, too. Among other things, it shows that he is a great janitor for Brown who loves and knows the place.

 

[indicolite22]

I am not sure if the book “Bringing down the House” wasn’t sponsored by the casinos because it showed them stupid in contrast to a group of MIT geniuses. Great attraction for new clients, lol.

But it would be interesting to find out how long Claudio stayed in Vegas. Maybe long enough to “start training” and lose all the money in the process?

IIRC, one of the articles stated that he only stayed for a month before moving to Florida.

 

[nhmemorymaker]

Fox News rewrite that’s not behind a paywall:

Brown University custodian told security suspicious man was ‘casing’ building weeks before shooting: report

Derek Lisi told Boston Globe he saw Brown University shooting suspect "casing" engineering building about 10 times since early January.

www.foxnews.com

With information like this, Brown is going to be in deep trouble.....

 

[nhmemorymaker]

Bureaucracy. Now Brown will spend a lot of money on external consultants, while all they needed to do was to listen in November-December to their own janitor.

lawsuits. lawsuits. lawsuits.

 

[nhmemorymaker]

But there is some obvious lack of common sense in the sutuation. A security guard said they were hired to watch the event but not the building. But the event is located in the building! If someone, God forbid, decides to blow up something in the building, or shoot outside the event hall but hit the outgoing participants, it does become the hired security's responsibility, immediately! If you are hired to "stay in the door and watch those walking in and out", then someone from the company has to check the part outside the hall and definitely have a connection with the campus police, just for such cases. Otherwise it looks (and seems to be the case) that the external security company provides talking mannequins. Sorry.

oh my.
Can you imagine being the parents of the two students who were killed, and reading ALL THIS,

As well, the trauma to all in the classroom, and all the students at Brown, learning how lax security is at their school.

 

[Charlot123]

oh my.
Can you imagine being the parents of the two students who were killed, and reading ALL THIS,

As well, the trauma to all in the classroom, and all the students at Brown, learning how lax security is at their school.

Absolutely. The whole story is so sad. Makes one feel angry, too.

It was just before the exams, the parents were expecting their kids home soon.

 

[Charlot123]

I never read about "happy now?" in his post

7 Investigates: Who was Claudio Valente before the shooting? - Boston News, Weather, Sports | WHDH 7News

BOSTON (WHDH) - A message from Claudio Valente was unconvered by 7 Investigates Friday in an archived post from the Brown University student directory, accouncing<a class="excerpt-read-more" href="https://whdh.com/news/7-investigates-who-was-claudio-valente-before-the-shooting/">Read More</a>

whdh.com