Campus Violence: Attack of the Faculty

[CountDeMoney]

Biology prof. charged with murder after triple-homicide at University of Alabama-Huntsville

KRISTIN M. HALL
Associated Press Writer

1:00 AM EST, February 13, 2010

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — A biology professor at the University of Alabama's Huntsville campus was charged with murder late Friday in the shooting deaths of three fellow biology professors at the campus.

Authorities say Amy Bishop, an instructor and researcher at the university, opened fire during an afternoon faculty meeting, killing the three colleagues and injuring three other school employees. Bishop has been charged with one count of capital murder, which means she could face the death penalty if convicted.

Bishop, 42, was taken Friday night in handcuffs from a police precinct to the county jail and could be heard saying, "It didn't happen. There's no way .... they are still alive."

Police said they were also interviewing a man as "a person of interest."

University spokesman Ray Garner said the three killed were Gopi K. Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and two other faculty members, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson.

Three others were wounded, two critically, in the gunfire, which Davis' husband said occurred at a meeting over a tenure issue. The injured were identified as department members Luis Cruz-Vera, who was listed in fair condition, and Joseph Leahy, in critical condition in intensive care, and staffer Stephanie Monticello, also in critical condition in intensive care.

No students were harmed in the shooting, which is in a community known for its space and technology industries.

Sammie Lee Davis said his wife, Maria Ragland Davis, was a researcher who had tenure at the university.

In a brief phone interview, he said he was told his wife was at a meeting to discuss the tenure status of another faculty member who got angry and started shooting.

He said his wife had mentioned the shooter before, describing the woman as "not being able to deal with reality" and "not as good as she thought she was."

Bishop, a neurobiologist who studied at Harvard University, joined the UAH biology faculty as an assistant professor in fall 2003.

She and her husband placed third in a statewide university business plan competition in July 2007, presenting a portable cell incubator they had invented. They won $25,000 to help start a company to market the device.

Amanda Tucker, a junior nursing major from Alabaster, Ala., had Bishop for anatomy class about a year ago. Tucker said a group of students went to a dean complaining about Bishop's performance in the classroom, and Tucker signed a petition complaining about Bishop.

"When it came down to tests, and people asked her what was the best way to study, she'd just tell you, 'Read the book.' When the test came, there were just ridiculous questions. No one even knew what she was asking,'" said Tucker.

Andrea Bennett, a sophomore majoring in nursing, was in one of Bishop's classes Friday morning.

Bennett said nothing seemed unusual, but she described Bishop as being "very weird" and "a really big nerd."

"She's well-known on campus, but I wouldn't say she's a good teacher. I've heard a lot of complaints," Bennett said. "She's a genius, but she really just can't explain things."

Bennett, an athlete at UAH, said her coach told her team Bishop had been denied tenure and that may have led to the shooting.

"She went to Harvard, so she is very smart. I can see that her getting denied tenure at UAH would be pretty upsetting," said Bennett.

Nick Lawton, 25, also took an anatomy and physiology class with Bishop last semester. He described her as funny and accommodating with students.

"She lectured from the textbook, mostly stuck to the subject matter at hand," Nick Lawton said. "She seemed like a nice enough professor."

Sophomore Erin Johnson told The Huntsville Times a biology faculty meeting was under way when she heard screams coming from a conference room.

University police secured the building and students were cleared from it. There was still a heavy police presence on campus Friday night, with police tape cordoning off the main entrance to the university.

The Huntsville campus has about 7,500 students in northern Alabama, not far from the Tennessee line. The university is known for its scientific and engineering programs and often works closely with NASA.

The space agency has a research center on the school's campus, where many scientists and engineers from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center perform Earth and space science research and development.

The university posted a message on its Web site Friday afternoon telling students the campus was closed Friday night and all students were encouraged to go home. Counselors were available to speak with students.

It's the second shooting in a week on an area campus. Last Friday, a 14-year-old student was killed in a middle school hallway in nearby Madison, allegedly by a fellow student.

"This town is unaccustomed to shootings and multiple deaths," Garner said.

Mass shootings are rarely carried out by women, said Dr. Park Dietz, who is president of Threat Assessment Group Inc., a Newport Beach, Calif.-based violence prevention firm.

A notable exception was the 1985 rampage by Sylvia Seegrist, who opened fire in a mall in Springfield, Pa., killing three. Dietz, who interviewed Seegrist after her arrest, said it was possible the suspect in Friday's shooting had a long-standing grudge against colleagues or superiors and felt complaints had not been dealt with fairly.

Gregg McCrary, a retired FBI agent and private criminal profiler based in Fredericksburg, Va., said there is no typical outline of a mass shooter but noted they often share a sense of paranoia, depression or a feeling that they are not appreciated.

"They think somebody is out to get them or has mistreated them in some way," McCrary said. "They go back to right this perceived injustice."

[CountDeMoney]

3 dead in Ala. university shooting
Alabama biology professor, upset over tenure denial, charged with murder
NBC, msnbc.com and news services
updated 12:27 a.m. ET, Sat., Feb. 13, 2010

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. - A biology professor was charged with murder Friday after a shooting at the University of Alabama-Huntsville campus that left three faculty members dead and three other people wounded.

Amy Bishop, a Harvard University-trained neuroscientist, was reportedly upset over being denied tenure. Her husband also was detained, local media reported, citing police and university sources and witnesses.

Bishop has been charged with one count of capital murder, which means she could face the death penalty if convicted.

Bishop was taken Friday night in handcuffs from a police precinct to the county jail and could be heard saying, "It didn't happen. There's no way ... they are still alive."

The mayhem occurred in a third-floor conference room of the Shelby Center, a 200,000-square-foot science building on campus. University of Alabama-Huntsville spokesman Ray Garner said a woman opened fire during an afternoon faculty meeting.

Three faculty members were killed and two faculty members and a staff member were injured, Garner said.

University spokesman Ray Garner said Friday night the three killed were Gopi K. Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and two other faculty members, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson.

Two others were in critical condition, and a third who was wounded was upgraded to fair condition. The injured were identified as department members Luis Cruz-Vera and Joseph Leahy and staffer Stephanie Monticello. Their specific conditions were not released.

Sammie Lee Davis said his wife, Maria Ragland Davis, was a researcher who had tenure at the university. In a brief phone interview, he said he was told his wife was at a meeting to discuss the tenure status of another faculty member who got angry and started shooting.

He said his wife had mentioned the shooter before, describing the woman as "not being able to deal with reality" and "not as good as she thought she was."

According to media reports, Bishop had been denied tenure Friday morning. She apparently returned to a campus faculty meeting in the afternoon and opened fire, university officials and witnesses told NBC station WAFF-TV.

It was unclear how many people were inside the conference room at the time. Garner said the suspected shooter was apprehended outside the building without incident.

Nick Lawton, the son of a biology professor at the school, said his father was not among the victims, but he did not know much more.

Lawton, 25, was exercising when a friend phoned him to tell him about the shooting. He called his father, Robert Lawton, and found out that he was not hurt, then he let the rest of his family know.

"All I know is that my father is OK," Nick Lawton told The Associated Press.

Screams heard
Erin Johnson, a sophomore and a student aide, told the Huntsville Times there was a biology faculty meeting under way when she heard screams coming from the room.

University police secured the building and students were cleared from it. There was still a heavy police presence on campus Friday night, with police tape cordoning off the main entrance to the university.

Gina Hammond, a UAH student, told WAFF that she lobbied the University of Alabama trustees to allow students with gun permits to carry their weapons on campus. She was turned down.

"I'm scared to go back to school," Hammond said. "However, if they were to allow me to carry my pistol on campus, I would not be as scared.

"... I'm sorry that nobody in that room had a pistol to save at least one person's life," Hammond said.

"This is a tragedy of immeasurable proportions and a terrible a blow to our community," said U.S. Rep. Parker Griffith, R-Ala., in whose district the shootings occurred. "Now is a time for thoughtful prayer for those affected."

Suspect noted for cell research
Bishop joined the UAH faculty in 2003. Her areas of research focused on the role of gases, especially nitrous oxide, on the central nervous system.

Her lab was working on the development of a "neural computer" that would use living neurons — taken either from stem cells or fish.

She was also known for her work on cell growth.

In June 2006, The Huntsville Times published a story involving Bishop and her husband, Jim Anderson, chief science officer of Cherokee Labsystems in Huntsville.

Together, the two designed a portable cell incubator that eliminates many of the problems with cultivating tissues in the fragile environment of the Petri dish, according to the article.

"It's great to actually see it hit the market, and the sooner the better," Bishop said in the story. "My colleagues think it will change the face of tissue culture. It will allow us, as researchers, to not live in the lab and control our tissue culture conditions, including the sensitive cultures including those like adult stem cells.

"The conditions to differentiate those have to be exact, and the incubator will help that."

The invention earned the couple $25,000 of seed money in a business competition.

The Huntsville campus has about 7,500 students in northern Alabama, not far from the Tennessee line. The university is known for its scientific and engineering programs and often works closely with NASA.

The space agency has a research center on the school's campus, where many scientists and engineers from NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center perform Earth and space science research and development.

Previous school shooting
It's the second shooting in a week on an area campus. Last Friday, a 14-year-old student was killed in a middle school hallway in nearby Madison, allegedly by a fellow student.

Female school shooters are rare. The Secret Service studied 41 attackers in 37 school shooting incidents. Of those, all were male.

But there have been female school shooters. For example, in February 2008 a female student shot and killed two classmates and then herself at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge.

© 2010 msnbc.com

[Jaron]

Oh at the "If I could carry my gun" comment!!!

[DontSayBanana]

Heh.  Sylvia Seegrist shouldn't really be cited as an exception; she was brought up in a recent class about how the insanity defense had adapted and moved away from being a complete defense (Sylvia Seegrist was found "guilty, but insane"- either one of or simply the first to receive the verdict and carry out the sentence after psychiatric rehabilitation).

[The Brain]

I find myself humming that Bob Gandalf song.

[Capetan Mihali]

I find myself humming that Bob Gandalf song.

I don't like any goddamn day of the week, but you don't see me shooting up schools, do you ??   

[stjaba]

This story reminds me of George Zinkhan. Last year, the University of Georgia marketing professor went on a shooting rampage, but I don't think he targeted faculty, instead killing his wife and two others. He ended up fleeing the scene, and initially the police had no idea where he went. He was very intelligent, a savvy outdoorsmen, and apparently had international connections, so speculation was rampant that he had some sort of elaborate scheme and was already outside of the country. His body was discovered nearby in a shallow grave with self inflicted gun shot wounds.

[DGuller]

I know that backstabbing is common in the academic world, but shooting?  Wow.

[DisturbedPervert]

She shot and killed her brother with a shotgun 24 years ago, was ruled an accident at the time.  She loaded the family shotgun after an argument and supposedly it accidentally went off

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/02/professor_accus.html

BRAINTREE -- The University of Alabama biology professor accused of opening fire and killing three colleagues at a faculty meeting Friday shot and killed her teenage brother more than two decades ago in Massachusetts, according to authorities.

But a local police chief and the district attorney's office gave differing accounts today of the 1986 shooting, which occurred at the siblings' home in Braintree, raising questions about the handling of that case.

According to the current Braintree police chief, Paul H. Frazier, Amy Bishop fatally shot her 18-year-old brother, Seth, on Dec. 6, 1986, but was set free the same day by Braintree Police under orders from then-Police Chief John Polio. In news accounts at the time, Polio called the death an accident that happened when Bishop was learning how to unload a shotgun.

Frazier challenged that account today, saying instead that Bishop shot her brother during an argument and fled on foot with the 12-gauge shotgun before being captured by police, who handcuffed her and took her to the station. The case file, including the report of the incident, disappeared shortly thereafter, he said.

''I don't want to use the word 'coverup,''' Frazier said. ''I don't know what the thought process was of the police chief at the time.''

But the Norfolk County district attorney's office this evening released a six-page report from its archives that showed State Police investigators reviewed the case with Braintree Police and concluded that Seth Bishop's death was an accident.


In the report, dated March 30, 1987, a Braintree Police captain said that Amy Bishop was released on the day of the shooting because she was too emotional to be questioned properly and because her mother said the shooting was accidental.

Local and State Police investigators returned to the home 11 days later to meet with Amy and her parents individually.

According to the investigation report, after Amy and her father had a disagreement, he left for a shopping trip and she went to her room. Amy decided to go to her parents' room to teach herself to load the shotgun the family had acquired the previous year for protection after a break-in. She succeeded but could not remove the shells, and the gun fired in the bedroom. Amy then went downstairs to ask for help unloading it and inadvertently shot her brother while her mother watched, according to the report.

Their stories to the detectives contained some discrepancies. Amy's mother said Amy asked her for help unloading the gun; she told Amy to be careful where she pointed it, and that Amy turned and accidentally shot her brother. Her mother said she screamed and called the police, as Amy ran out of the house.

Amy said she asked her brother, not her mother, for help unloading the gun, and that she was pointing it beside her leg for safety. She said her brother told her to point it up instead. As he walked across the kitchen floor, someone said something, and Amy turned and the gun went off.

Frazier said at a press conference this afternoon that he was a patrolman at the time of the shooting, but was not one of the officers who responded to the Bishop home. He based his account on an officer who was at the scene.

At his home in Braintree today, Polio, who is retired, disputed Frazier's version.
''That's a joke. That's got to be a joke. If anybody knows history, I never covered anything up,'' he said. He said he thought that the Bishop family's explanation of an accident was murky and that he wanted the district attorney to hold an inquiry.

But just one day after the shooting, Polio told the Globe, ''every indication at this point in time leads us to believe it was an accidental shooting.''

The district attorney at the time, current US Representative William D. Delahunt, is out of the country and could not be reached for comment.

Frazier said that the Bishop case file was missing from the records today and that he was told by an officer that it had been missing since at least 1988.

Seth Bishop was pronounced dead at a Quincy hospital 46 minutes after the shooting, from a gunshot wound to the abdomen, according to the Globe accounts.

The teen was an accomplished violinist who played with the Greater Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra. He won third place at a statewide science fair and was an aspiring electrical engineer and Northeastern University freshman at the time of his death.

In Friday's shooting, Bishop, 42, a Harvard-educated neurobiologist, allegedly shot and killed three of her colleagues and wounded three others in an apparent tenure dispute at the Huntsville campus

[KRonn]

What exactly did go on anyway? Police report not mentioning arrests; the woman used the gun to try and get hold of a get away car? At the least, given that she threatened other people, I'd think she'd face some charges, even if mitigated by her shock at having accidentally shot her brother. And as an accident, now they're questioning that as well. 

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view.bg?articleid=1233152

William Delahunt aide says police downplayed need for probe

U.S. Rep. and former Norfolk District Attorney William Delahunt yesterday backed off earlier claims he didn't recall the 1986 shooting death of Amy Bishop's brother, with a top aide now saying police downplayed the need for further investigation.

Mark Forest, Delahunt's chief of staff, said both state and local police told the former top prosecutor they believed Amy Bishop, then 20, had accidentally blasted her 18-year-old brother, Seth, with their father's shotgun.

"They pretty much found the death was accidental and there was no need for further action," Forest told the Herald.

But Republican Joe Malone, a former state treasurer who is strongly considering a run against Delahunt, demanded a full accounting about how he handled the investigation into the professor now accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville.

"He owes a complete explanation to the people of Massachusetts and the families of those murdered in Alabama," Malone said.

Delahunt's spokesman, Forest, shot back.

"Getting advice on credible statements from Joe Malone is like getting investment advice from Bernie Madoff," he said. "It is sad that in the midst of a national tragedy like this, we have a long-time politician trying to score cheap political points."

Bishop, now a 44-year-old neurobiology professor, allegedly murdered three colleagues and wounded three others at a faculty meeting in a shooting rampage apparently fueled by her anger over being denied tenure.

Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier has alleged the probe into Seth Bishop's death was politically derailed by the town's former top cop, John Polio.

Frazier has said cops who arrested Bishop at the time told him she shot her brother during an argument, but that Polio ordered those cops to let her go. Polio has denied that charge.

Bishop's actions after the shooting have raised questions about the handling of the case.

Bishop ran from her parents' Victorian manse with the shotgun and pointed it at a passing car in an attempt to get the driver to stop, according to Frazier, who said his information came from cops who arrested Bishop in 1986.

The Herald reported yesterday that Bishop then held the gun to the chest of an auto body worker at the now-defunct Dave Dinger's in Braintree and demanded a getaway car, according to the former worker, Thomas Pettigrew, 45.

Braintree cops caught up with Bishop nearby, according to Frazier and Pettigrew. But there is no mention of Bishop's arrest in a six-page report written by Trooper Brian Howe, a former member of Delahunt's state police squad. Howe could not be reached.

[Malthus]

My father was visiting the University of Iowa when a Chinese graduate student in physics hunted down and killed a bunch of faculty. He was actually in the building where the murders took place, but didn't hear a thing.

A film was later made based on this incident, entitled "Dark Matter":

http://www.darkmatterthefilm.com/

I haven't seen it.

My suspicion is that, for many academics, the academic world is basically the whole world; and it is very small, nasty and competitive in one's specific sub-field. Failing to get tenure or praise is the equivalent of being killed off, and those who are prone already to violence may react violently.

[MadImmortalMan]

Amy Bishop was charged with assault in 2002 IHOP dispute
EmailE-mail|Link February 16, 2010 06:51 PM

By Maria Cramer and Travis Andersen, Globe Staff

In March, 2002, Bishop walked into an International House of Pancakes in Peabody with her family, asked for a booster seat for one of her children, and learned the last seat had gone to another mother.

Bishop, according to a police report, strode over to the other woman, demanded the seat and launched into a profanity-laced rant.

When the woman would not give the seat up, Bishop punched her in the head, all the while yelling "I am Dr. Amy Bishop."

Bishop received probation and prosecutors recommended that she be sent to anger management classes, though it is unclear from court documents whether a judge ever sent her there.
The woman, identified in court documents as Michelle Gjika, declined to comment, saying only "It's not something I want to relive."

That's one finely-honed sense of entitlement. No wonder she felt justified in knocking off those who would deny her tenure

[Razgovory]

Assertive.

[DGuller]

Certainly not gun-shy.

[The Brain]

I would kill for pancakes. Not for booster seats or tenure.