The professor accused of killing three colleagues during a faculty meeting was a Harvard-educated neurobiologist, inventor and mother whose life had been marred by a violent episode in her distant past.
More than two decades ago, police said, Amy Bishop killed her teenage brother with a shotgun at their Massachusetts home in a shooting that investigators concluded was an accident.
Bishop had just months left as a teacher at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) when police said she opened fire with a handgun on Friday in a room filled with a dozen of her colleagues from the school’s biology department.
Bishop was to leave after this semester because she had been denied tenure. Police say she is 42, but the university’s Web site lists her as 44.
Some have said she was upset after being denied the job-for-life security afforded tenured academics.
Authorities have refused to discuss a motive.
William Setzer, chairman of chemistry department at UAH, said Bishop was appealing the decision made last year.
The three killed were Gopi Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and two other faculty members, Maria Ragland Davis and Adriel Johnson. The wounded were still recovering in hospitals early on Saturday.
Descriptions of Bishop from students and colleagues were mixed. Some saw a strange woman who had difficulty relating to her students, while others described a witty, intelligent teacher.
Bishop shot her brother, Seth, an 18-year-old accomplished violinist, in the chest in 1986, said Paul Frazier, the police chief in Braintree, Massachusetts, where the shooting occurred.
The Norfolk County District Attorney’s office released a 1987 report with details of their investigation, based on interviews with Amy Bishop and her parents conducted by a state trooper after the shooting. The report concluded Seth Bishop was killed by an “accidental discharge of a firearm.”
Amy Bishop told investigators she was trying to learn how to use a shotgun that her father had purchased for protection in the home after a break-in. She said she did not know how to use the weapon and brought it to the kitchen for help unloading it.
She said she was raising it when “someone said something to her and she turned and the gun went off” while her brother was walking across the kitchen, according to the report.
She then ran out of the house with the weapon. When she talked to investigators 11 days after the shooting, she told them she could only remember hearing her mother scream and she didn’t know the gunshot struck her brother until later.
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