Hours after police identified the suspect in a downtown mass shooting on March 1, Lillian Brady sent an urgent email to a detective in the Travis County Sheriff’s Office. Her subject line: “That’s him!!”

“The shooter was my assaulter,” Brady wrote, the latest in a long string of communications about an investigation into her alleged assault last year at Gigafactory Texas. 

The next day, Sheriff’s Detective Joshua Garrison called to tell her the case would be closed because the person suspected of assaulting her had died. Ndiaga Diagne, the suspect in the shooting, had been fatally shot by police responding to the scene on West Sixth Street.

She’d been seeking his identity since late December, wishing to bring him to justice.

Four days after the shooting, Brady instead filed a lawsuit against Tesla Inc., accusing her employer of failing to provide a safe work environment and of withholding Diagne’s name as she pursued charges.

She says she “wasn’t really looking for a lawsuit” against Tesla but thought it should have identified Diagne sooner. Now she wonders if the three people killed and 14 wounded that morning instead would have made it home safely if the Austin automaker had provided his identity. 

“I think this needs to be brought out that this individual probably wouldn’t have done this tragedy that he did on Sunday if something would have been done by Tesla,” Brady said in an interview later that week. 

With her pastor at her side and tears in her eyes, she offered condolences to the victims and their loved ones. 

“I’m looking at these families that got injured because Tesla held back the information,” Brady said. “If they were to release the name or arrest him on the spot — because we had deputies outside — maybe all this could have been avoided. Or at least be on their radar. Something would have happened.”

Brady started working at Tesla in January 2023, seeking out the automaker after her former coworkers at Amazon informed her that Tesla was hiring and could offer more lucrative pay.

She was hired and started in a role with the cell department, producing parts of the batteries Tesla uses. Later, she was moved with dozens of others to the general assembly area, where she holds a role as a process assistant. 

As she prepared for work Dec. 4, she was expecting a typical workday.

Her days start early. She usually leaves home in Buda about 3:40 a.m. and goes through security upon arriving at the factory east of Austin. That day, she ate breakfast in her car and took a brief nap, then checked on her German Shepherd back home with her Ring camera.  

Finally, about a quarter to 6 a.m., Brady said, she started to walk into the building. 

“I take the little path that I normally take every day. See the forklift guys there like every day. And this individual was praying on the floor, and I stopped,” she said. “I had my work bag on one arm, and my lunch bag in the other arm.” 

“I stopped and I was gonna walk around, and he stood up and just pushed me … just threw me, and I went flying backwards and landed on my tailbone, my back,” Brady said. 

One of the men on a forklift came running to help her up. Others followed. Sensing the witnesses were upset, Brady said, she instructed them not to do anything else. 

Upon arriving at her workstation, Brady told her supervisor what had happened and security was called. After guiding security personnel to the site of the incident, Brady said she went back to her workstation while they reviewed security camera footage. She sent an email informing security that she wanted to file charges.

By then her hip and back were “swelling up,” she said, and Tesla sent her to a medical center in Manor.

“At my age, it’s very hard to bounce back,” said Brady, who was then 65. The day after the incident, it took her three hours to get out of bed. Her injuries required a visit to another urgent care center in Kyle. 

Brady also went to the Manor Police Department to report the incident, she said, and was later directed to the Travis County Sheriff’s Office. 

An account of the incident Diagne gave to one of his neighbors differs from Brady’s.

According to the neighbor, who requested anonymity because he works for the federal government, Diagne expressed frustration over his access to a designated prayer room at the factory.

He told his neighbor he was a devout Muslim and wanted to pray multiple times throughout his shift. Praying five times per day is a pillar of Islam. But that created conflict with management at Tesla.

The room where Diagne said he believed he could pray was a 15 minute walk from his work area, he said, which would require missing too much of his shift. So, Diagne told his neighbor, he began laying out his prayer mat by his work area. 

At one point, Diagne told his neighbor, his supervisor stepped on the mat while explaining to Diagne that he could not have it out on the factory floor. Diagne responded by “gently pushing” the supervisor, the neighbor recounted being told, to get her off of the mat. 

The altercation resulted in Diagne being fired from his job at Tesla, he told his neighbor. 

Brady, though, said she is not a manager and denied having stepped on Diagne’s prayer mat. 

Asked if she was confident that Tesla’s security video would corroborate her account, Brady replied, “I believe so.” Her attorneys have been seeking access to it for weeks.

But, she said, she does not want to see it herself. 

“I see it enough in my mind every day,” Brady said. 

From the day of the incident until Jan. 23, Brady said, she was on leave from Tesla, receiving “no support” from the company. Her workers’ compensation claim was denied, according to an email from a workplace health specialist at Tesla. Brady said the company had cited a pre-existing condition.

Shortly after the incident, she received an invitation from LaDonna Wilder, a senior human resources partner at Tesla, requesting a Dec. 9 virtual meeting to discuss Brady’s allegations. Over the course of two calls with Wilder and other interactions with Tesla’s human resources department, Brady said, she was not provided the name of her alleged assailant.  

Upon her return to Tesla in late January, she heard he had been fired.

Though back at work, Brady continued physical therapy sessions — and continued seeking Diagne’s identity so she could bring charges.

In late December and early January, she asked the sheriff’s office for updates on the case but there wasn’t much to report, the department replied. On Jan. 9, a detective informed Brady the office had not yet received items it sought through a court order served to Tesla the previous week. 

“The court order had to be physically mailed to an office in Dallas, TX, which sadly it is taking a while to go through the US Postal service,” the detective wrote. “I am hoping they will return the requested items to me electronically and not through the US Postal Service. Sadly, without any identifying information for the suspect being known, we have to wait for Tesla to provide it to us.”

Finally, on Feb. 25 — three days before the shooting on West Sixth Street — Garrison confirmed that he had the name of the assailant and had obtained video of the incident from Tesla.

“I plan to reach out to the other employee for a statement sometime tomorrow or early next week,” he told Brady in an email, apparently referring to Diagne. 

In her reply, she requested the video and asked for the name of the employee. Garrison apologized, saying the materials couldn’t be provided due to the ongoing investigation.

Tesla did not respond to requests for comment on its handling of the incident, Brady’s requests and the investigation.

The sheriff’s office declined to comment, citing Brady’s civil litigation. It confirmed that the investigation into Brady’s alleged assault was closed by exception because the suspect is deceased. The Austin American-Statesman has reviewed correspondence between Brady and detectives on her case, her emails to Tesla and other text messages. The newspaper has filed a request with the sheriff’s office and Manor police for all records and communications related to the investigation. 

Hilliard Law, which is representing Brady, said it is still working with Tesla attorneys to obtain the security video footage of the Dec. 4 incident. The firm said it has been contacted by victims and families wishing to understand whether the shooting was preventable if Tesla had been forthcoming. 

“We already know the shooter violently assaulted a Tesla employee months before the Sixth Street shooting and Tesla had the shooter’s name and information about that earlier attack — why they chose not to act or warn law enforcement raises very serious questions the public deserves an answer to,” said Bob Hilliard, one of Brady’s attorneys. 

Brady put it this way: “He could have been behind bars. Maybe got scared, run away. Moved out of town.”

After the shooting, she received a text message from an FBI agent who wanted to talk about her alleged assault at Gigafactory Texas. She returned the call Monday morning. 

By that afternoon, while she was at work, Brady said she was directed to a conference room where she was put on the phone with two Tesla lawyers. They told her she wasn’t required to talk to the FBI and that meeting with the agents would be on a voluntary basis. Brady said it felt like they were “kind of trying to intimidate me not to talk to them.” 

“But they didn’t know that I had talked to the other agents,” she said. “I don’t mind talking to the agents, giving them the facts. Whatever it takes to help out with the case.” 

When she spoke that day with the FBI agents on site at Tesla, she said, she detailed the alleged December incident for them.  

A spokesperson for the FBI in San Antonio declined to comment on the agency’s interactions with Tesla or Brady.

“As this is an active investigation, we are unable to provide additional information at this time,” said Carmen Portillo, the spokesperson. 

Reflecting on the lawsuit, Brady referenced her faith and the victims of the shooting.

“I prayed about it a lot, and I heard God’s voice a lot, and I asked for guidance on this, and I’m supposed to be a vessel of hope for these families,” she said. 

And, even after filing suit against Tesla, she expressed deep enjoyment in her work, which she said was “electrifying.”

“I like my job. If I didn’t like my job, I would have been gone a long time ago,” Brady said. “I have good references, I have good work ethics … I enjoy the co-workers here. I have friends here.” 

But, she added, “I don’t like what happened. I don’t like how Tesla handled it for being a very huge corporation. It’s unethical; it’s totally unethical what happened.”