A 67-year-old professor who had been rejected by several colleges and universities went on a shooting rampage on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, killing three faculty members, police said.
After a man was fatally wounded in a shootout with police, Anthony Polito was found to be carrying nine magazines for a 9mm handgun he purchased legally last year.
He also had a list of targets at the university, but none of those killed were on that list, police said Thursday.
Police have not yet established the shooter’s motive.
The shooting also injured a 38-year-old visiting professor who was hospitalized in life-threatening condition.
The university is expected to close on Friday and is expected to reopen next week for exams.
Polito arrived at the university by car about 15 minutes before the shooting began and entered one of the buildings, from where gunshots were heard.
Terrified students and professors barricaded themselves in classrooms and offices as the gunman roamed the top three floors of the university’s five-story business school building.
He was killed in a shootout about 10 minutes after the shooting was first reported. The Las Vegas Police Department said it happened as he was leaving the building and opened fire on university police officers.
Authorities searched the business school building and found the bodies of three dead and one injured.
County Sheriff Kevin McMahill said Polito brought more than 150 rounds of ammunition to campus. McMahill suggested that Polito may have intended to open fire on the student union building next to the business school, where students spent their free time eating and playing.
Polito had a “target list” of faculty members at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and East Carolina University, where he taught from 2001 to 2017, McMahill said.
“No one on the target list was attacked,” McMahill said.
After reviewing his car camera footage, police discovered that before leaving for college, he stopped at the post office, where he mailed 22 letters to college professors across the country.
Some contained an unknown white powder that appeared harmless, police said, without revealing the contents of the letters.
The sheriff said investigators are still determining a motive, but noted that Polito applied to several colleges and universities in Nevada but was rejected from all of them.
Polito appeared to be experiencing financial difficulties, officials said Thursday. When they arrived at his apartment to conduct a search, they found an eviction notice taped to the front door, McMahill said.
Below, detectives found a chair with an arrow pointing to a document “that looked like a will,” McMahill said, without elaborating.
One of Polito’s former students at East Carolina University, Paul Whittington, said the professor seemed obsessed with the anonymous reviews that students wrote about professors at the end of each semester.
According to Whittington, Polito told the students that he remembered the faces of those who left bad reviews and that he was sure he knew who they were and where they sat, pointing to seats in the audience.
“He always talked about negative reviews,” said Whittington, who took Polito’s class in 2014. “There weren’t many, but every semester there is always one student who writes a negative review. And he was obsessed with it.”
