Vegas shooter who killed 3 was professor who recently applied for job at UNLV

[marshwiggle]

Associated Press

LAS VEGAS — Terrified students and professors cowered in classrooms and dorms as a gunman roamed the floors of a University of Nevada, Las Vegas building, killing three people and critically wounding a fourth before dying in a shootout with police.
The gunman in Wednesday's shooting was a professor who had unsuccessfully sought a job at the school, a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation told The Associated Press. He previously worked at East Carolina University in North Carolina, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information publicly.

[Wahoo Redux]

From ABC:

Polito maintained a LinkedIn page and a personal website. On the website, he published a 15-page document on the Zodiac Killer, claiming to have decoded some of the cryptic messages from the killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s.

Mental illness is the most likely scenario, I think.

[BadWolf]

I'm still trying to connect with a friend who worked in that building... :(

[marshwiggle]

From ABC:

Polito maintained a LinkedIn page and a personal website. On the website, he published a 15-page document on the Zodiac Killer, claiming to have decoded some of the cryptic messages from the killer who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s.

Mental illness is the most likely scenario, I think.

Isn't that kind of like attributing a death to "heart failure"? Any death happens when the heart stops, and anyone going on a shooting rampage is not in "good mental health", by any reasonable definition.

[jimbogumbo]

His personal web page is still up. He lists MENSA  membership, and has a 47 page vita with around 12 refereed publications. It contains a huge list of service work.

[Hegemony]

The NY Post has some interesting information:

"Polito's LinkedIn account states he was a "semi-retired university professor" based in Las Vegas and attended undergraduate at Radford University in Virginia, where he graduated with a double major in mathematics and statistics before he earned his master's degree at Duke University and completed his doctorate of philosophy at the University of Georgia. He served as an associate professor for 15½ years at East Carolina University from August 2001 to January 2017."

and even more interesting:

"During that time, he also ran a personal website about his life, in which he posted a 15-page theory claiming he decoded the messages left by the Zodiac Killer, who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s. He further claimed to have solved the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and figured out the true meaning of Leonardo DiCaprio's 2010 film "Inception."... In the favorite-movie section, Polito includes "Apocalypse: Now" and recommends Oliver Stone's conspiracy-laden "JFK" and Ayn Rand's conservative epic "The Fountainhead." Polito writes that each of his favorite films "argues a truth with powerful eloquence."

"His site also lists people he credited as the "Great Minds of the Twentieth Century," including George Soros, Nikola Tesla and astronomer Carl Sagan. In a section titled "Powerful Organizations Bent on World Domination," Polito includes the Rothschild family, the National Security Administration and even the Economics Department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The section also linked back to a website created by far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones."

https://nypost.com/2023/12/07/news/unlv-mass-shooting-suspect-idd-as-anthony-polito-professor-who-failed-to-get-job-at-school/

[jimbogumbo]

Don't know how long this will be up: https://www.tonypolito.com

[Parasaurolophus]

and completed his doctorate of philosophy at the University of Georgia.

Just to be clear, his PhD is in "operations management", not philosophy.

[Hegemony]

Don't know how long this will be up: https://www.tonypolito.com

From his website (linked above), perhaps the most interesting category is:

Powerful Organzations Bent on Global Domination! • 1001 Club • Bank for International Settlements • Bilderberg Group • Bohemian Grove • Club of Rome • Committee of 300 • Council on Foriegn Relations • Echelon • Economics Department at MIT • Freemasonry • Illuminati • International Monetary Fund • Monsanto • National Security Administration • Prison Planet • Shape-shifting Reptilian Aliens & David Icke • The Anonymous Operations Payback Network • The Hellfire Club • The Rosicrucians • The Rothchild Family • The Trilateral Commission • Skull & Bones • United Nations

The Illuminati ... well. Not to mention Shape-Shifting Reptilian Aliens. (I prefer the aliens who keep their ET-like form myself.)

[dismalist]

Powerful Organizations Bent on Global Domination! ... Economics Department at MIT ... .

Well, yeah! Thank God for the University of Chicago Economics Department to keep those guys at bay. :-)

It's very, very sad, but we don't want this incident to lead us into hiring every disgruntled academic.

[Caracal]

Don't know how long this will be up: https://www.tonypolito.com

From his website (linked above), perhaps the most interesting category is:

Powerful Organzations Bent on Global Domination! • 1001 Club • Bank for International Settlements • Bilderberg Group • Bohemian Grove • Club of Rome • Committee of 300 • Council on Foriegn Relations • Echelon • Economics Department at MIT • Freemasonry • Illuminati • International Monetary Fund • Monsanto • National Security Administration • Prison Planet • Shape-shifting Reptilian Aliens & David Icke • The Anonymous Operations Payback Network • The Hellfire Club • The Rosicrucians • The Rothchild Family • The Trilateral Commission • Skull & Bones • United Nations

The Illuminati ... w

His personal web page is still up. He lists MENSA  membership, and has a 47 page vita with around 12 refereed publications. It contains a huge list of service work.

Yeah I saw that too. It's obviously not the point, but I couldn't help thinking "who puts a line on their CV every time they write a letter of rec or goes to some department reception."

[Langue_doc]

The latest from the NYT:

Man Who Killed 3 U.N.L.V. Faculty Members Had Pursued College Jobs, Officials Say
The 67-year-old gunman taught at East Carolina University for nearly 16 years and had a target list of faculty members there and at U.N.LV., the police said.

The first half of the article:

The man who shot and killed three faculty members on Wednesday at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was himself a professor who had tried and failed to get several jobs at colleges in the state, the authorities said on Thursday.

The gunman, Anthony Polito, 67, was living in a Las Vegas suburb and was killed by the police during a shootout after his rampage, officials said. Mr. Polito also shot and injured a fourth person, a man identified as a 38-year-old visiting professor who was being treated at a hospital for life-threatening wounds.

Shortly before the shooting, the police said, Mr. Polito had mailed 22 letters to employees at universities across the country, at least one of which contained an unknown white powder. The contents of the additional letters were not yet known.

Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said Mr. Polito had used a 9-millimeter handgun to carry out the attack and brought 11 magazines with him, two of which had been emptied by the time he was killed.

The Clark County coroner's office identified two of the people who were killed as Patricia Navarro Velez, 39, an assistant professor of accounting, and Cha Jan Chang, 64, who went by Jerry and was a professor of management information systems. Both had offices inside Frank and Estella Beam Hall, which houses the U.N.L.V. business school and where the shooting took place across several floors.

The identity of the third faculty member who was killed was being withheld until officials could notify the person's family.

Mr. Polito taught at the business school at East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., for nearly 16 years, until 2017. Sheriff McMahill said the police were still trying to understand the gunman's exact motive, but that he had made a list of people he was seeking on the U.N.L.V. campus as well as at East Carolina University. None of those individuals were actually shot in the attack.

Mr. Polito was in financial trouble, and officers found a notice of eviction on his front door when they arrived at his apartment on Wednesday, the sheriff said.

The shooting rattled the campus of one of Nevada's largest colleges — which sits just east of the Las Vegas Strip, the main casino corridor — at a time when students were preparing for final exams scheduled for next week. The police said Mr. Polito had started shooting inside the business school hall shortly before noon on Wednesday.

A U.N.L.V. police officer arrived within 78 seconds of the initial call of a shooter on campus, and more officers soon followed, immediately entering the building, officials said.

The exact movements of the officers and gunman were not clear — there were no security cameras in the hallways, the sheriff said — but the shooter eventually exited the building about 10 minutes after the first report of gunfire. There, he confronted a police officer, and the two engaged in a shootout, during which the officer fatally shot Mr. Polito, based on video that was shown at a news conference on Thursday.

Students had been exiting classes when they heard gunshots and ran to cower in classrooms with the lights turned off. The business school is in the heart of campus and sits next to the Student Union, where students were enjoying food and a Lego-building event intended to help them relax before final exams.

Sheriff McMahill noted that the gunman still had about 150 rounds of ammunition on him when he was killed, and said he believed that the gunman might have continued his attack at the Student Union had he not been stopped.

"I believe we averted a much larger tragedy by the actions of that heroic police officer," the sheriff said.

[Langue_doc]

The second half of the NYT article:

The gunman had an address at the Promontory Point apartments in Henderson, a suburban city south of Las Vegas. On Thursday, the stucco-style buildings and apartment complex were quiet. Caution tape blocked off the section of the complex where Mr. Polito's apartment was, next to a small pool, with two police officers standing in front of his building.

Michele Pearson, a 54-year-old occupational therapist who lives in a neighboring building, was watching "C.S.I. Vegas" on Wednesday night when she heard a SWAT team arrive at the complex. She said law enforcement officers announced on a bullhorn that they had a search warrant for the apartment number where Mr. Polito lived.

The officers called out a few times, and then Ms. Pearson heard a bang.

The apartment complex is about a 20-minute drive from U.N.L.V.'s campus, where police cruisers dotted the grounds on Thursday.

David Lenzin, 25, a computer engineering student from Calgary, Alberta, had returned to collect things from a design competition that was held by the engineering department on Wednesday. He and other students had dressed up and gotten to campus early to show off designs that they had spent a year making; Mr. Lenzin's was a prototype of a robot that would clean surfaces.

"It's eerie being on campus," he said. "It's empty. There's cops everywhere. When you walk past people on campus, you just see crestfallen faces."

For many students on campus — nearly 90 percent of whom are Nevadans — the shooting recalled the horrors of the 2017 attack at a country music concert just a few miles away. That shooting, the deadliest in modern American history, left 60 people dead and hundreds more injured.

U.N.L.V.'s president, Keith E. Whitfield, said on Thursday that Professor Navarro Velez joined the university about five years ago. She previously worked at PwC, the accounting firm, in Puerto Rico, and went to college at the University of Puerto Rico. She had gotten her Ph.D. in accounting at the University of Central Florida, according to her biography on the U.N.L.V. website.

Professor Chang had taught at the school for more than 20 years after receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, according to his résumé. He had completed his undergraduate studies in oceanography at National Taiwan Ocean University.

Mr. Whitfield, the president, said in a statement that the shooting on Wednesday had been, in many ways, "the realization of our greatest fear."

At a news conference, he resisted the idea of closing off the campus to the city around it.

"My inclination is not to close the campus but to see if there are other things we can do," he said, adding that he supported the idea of adding more security cameras.

[Wahoo Redux]

I'm pretty sure this guy was over on Reddit and posted some of his psychosis there.  I, along with a number of other people, responded critically to one of his crazy posts, and then it disappeared.  I'm kind of creeped out by that. 

[Hegemony]

I'm pretty sure this guy was over on Reddit and posted some of his psychosis there.  I, along with a number of other people, responded critically to one of his crazy posts, and then it disappeared.  I'm kind of creeped out by that. 

Yikes. Wahoo Redux, do you mind saying which page on Reddit he was posting on?