Shooting death in professor's distant past

HUNTSVILLE - 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 fatally shot her teenage brother at their Massachusetts home in what officers at the time logged as an accident - though authorities said yesterday that records of the shooting were missing.

Bishop had just months left to teach at the University of Alabama in Huntsville when police said she opened fire with a handgun on Saturday in a room filled with a dozen of her colleagues from the biology department.

Bishop, a rare female suspect in a workplace shooting, was to leave after this semester because she had been denied tenure.

Police say she is 42, but the university's website lists her as 44.

Some have said she was upset after being denied the job-for-life security afforded tenured academics, and the husband of one victim and one of Bishop's students said they were told the shooting stemmed from the university's refusal to grant her such status.

Authorities have refused to discuss a motive, and a university spokesman said the faculty meeting was not called to discuss tenure.

William Setzer, chairman of the chemistry department, said Bishop was appealing against the decision made last year.

"Politics and personalities" always play a role in the tenure process, he said. "In a close department it's more so. If you have any lone wolves or bizarre personalities, it's a problem and I'm thinking that certainly came into play here."

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 hospital. Luis Cruz-Vera was in fair condition; Joseph Leahy in critical condition; and staffer Stephanie Monticciolo also was in critical condition.

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 was well known in the research community, appearing on the cover of the winter 2009 issue of The Huntsville R&D Report. However, it was not clear how many of her colleagues and students knew about a more tragic part of her past.

She shot her brother, an 18-year-old accomplished violinist, in the chest in 1986, said Paul Frazier, the police chief in Braintree, Massachusetts, where the shooting occurred.

Bishop fired at least three shots, hitting her brother once and hitting her bedroom wall before police took her into custody at gunpoint, he said.

Frazier said the police chief at the time told officers to release Bishop to her mother before she could be booked. It was logged as an accident.

But Frazier's account was disputed by former police chief John Polio, who told AP he did not call officers to tell them to release Bishop. "There's no cover-up, no missing records," he said.

Attempts by AP to track down addresses and phone numbers for Bishop's family in the Braintree area were not immediately successful. The current police chief said he believed her family had moved away.

Bishop's husband, James Anderson, was detained and questioned by police but has not been charged. Police said a 9mm handgun was found in the bathroom of the building where the shootings occurred and Bishop did not have a permit for it.

While it is rare for the stresses of the tenure process to incur violence, it is even rarer for a woman to be accused in such an incident.

"Workplace shootings of that kind are overwhelmingly male," said Franklin Zimring, director of violence prevention at the University of California, Berkeley. "Going postal was essentially a monopoly position of the XY chromosome."

- AP