A US biology professor charged over shooting dead three colleagues at a faculty meeting had killed her 18-year-old brother two decades earlier in a gun incident dismissed as an accident at the time, it emerged yesterday.
Amy Bishop (45) was arrested on Friday after allegedly opening fire on a campus room full of teaching staff at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, killing three lecturers and wounding three others.
Colleagues suggested the Harvard-educated geneticist was upset over the prospect of losing her job after being denied permanent tenure by the university.
Described as a research “star”, Dr Bishop had developed a new approach to treating the degenerative condition amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease.
William Setzer, chairman of the chemistry department at UAH, said Dr Bishop was appealing the decision not to grant her tenure which was 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.”
But investigators have discovered Dr Bishop has a troubled past. At 19, she shot her younger brother, Seth, in the chest with a pump-action shotgun in the kitchen of their family home in Massachusetts.
His death in 1986 was ruled an accident by the authorities, who accepted her explanation that she had accidentally opened fire while trying to learn how to unload bullets from the gun’s chamber.
But a local senior police officer has cast doubt on this account, saying Dr Bishop was only released after a high-level intervention. “The release of Ms Bishop did not sit well with the police officers, and I can assure you that this would not happen in this day and age,” said Paul Frazier, chief of police in Braintree, near Boston.
Mr Frazier pledged a full review after it was revealed that an official report into the 1986 killing had gone missing. At a press conference, he said Dr Bishop’s mother was a town official and the teenager had been released on the direct orders of the then police chief.