From security vendor to suspect in Lowell
Menacing behavior by government contractor
By 
TIMOTHY GROVER’S FIRM was hired by city and state government to provide security services, but he was the one who raised the alarm Monday when he slipped into Lowell High School and went on a tear – menacing people with threats of violence.
Today, a judge in Lowell is scheduled to determine whether Grover is too dangerous to let out of custody. Another reckoning remains for the business arrangements of his Lowell security firm, Madison Security Group.
The Lowell Sun’s Elizabeth Dobbins reports that Lowell Public Schools told the company it would no longer use its services and City Manager Eileen Donoghue has instructed her legal department to review a three-year $2.4 million contract for Madison to secure five Lowell parking garages.
Reporters haven’t been able to get a peep out of Madison so far. Megan’s House Foundation, a substance abuse treatment home for women that Grover established after the tragic 2014 overdose death of his daughter, was more proactive about distancing itself from the man. The organization said Grover “has not been involved with any aspect of our operations” since a year and a half ago.
Ironically in retrospect, Madison had been hired by Lowell schools to respond to nighttime alarms and vandalism, providing up to $5,000 per year in security services for the schools.
Grover’s alleged rampage through the downtown school occurred the day before the start of classes.
Bill Shields, a reporter for CBS Boston, summed it up in a piece after Grover’s arrest, saying “This is really a strange one. No good explanation for it.”
After a “couple of drinks at lunch,” the 55-year-old Dracut man remembers going into the school, but claimed to police that his memory thereafter went blank, according to a thorough account by Boston.com. Security footage caught him entering a side door that had been propped open by workers, and once inside, a woman claims, an intoxicated Grover threatened her while she was preparing a classroom.
Grover allegedly told her to call the police “because someone is going to rape you.” When she asked who, he said, “I am” and then tried to block her exit as she ran out of the room, according to the woman’s report to police.
During a separate incident inside the school, Grover approached students in an auditorium who were participating in club activities, and allegedly grabbed a boy by the collar, insisting, “You have a gun on you.” Grover allegedly pushed a female teacher out of the way as the boy and other students left the auditorium. According to police statements, he chased the boy down a hallway and took a swing at him, but missed, and caught a punch in return from the fleeing student.
It all calls to mind another strange incident of a well-known, successful, middle-aged man suddenly behaving erratically in downtown Lowell. Nine years ago, Jim Marzilli, then a 50-year-old state senator from Arlington, accosted women on the street, and then fled until he was apprehended, coincidentally in light of this week’s news, at one of the city’s parking garages.