U of Alabama @ Hunstville shooting 2/12/10-Amy Bishop Anderson Sentenced LWOP

[trimmonthelake]

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hf_Cw1b1x1DmRrdG4hiu4P55yZTgD9DU1JHG0
Students complained about prof charged in rampage

By JAY REEVES (AP) – 1 hour ago

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — Students say they complained to administrators about an Alabama professor accused of killing three colleagues and wounding three others in a shooting rampage during a faculty meeting.

The students upset with biology professor Amy Bishop told The Associated Press they went to University of Alabama in Huntsville administrators at least three times, complaining she was ineffective in the classroom and had odd, unsettling ways.

A petition signed by dozens of students was sent to the department head. But students said the complaints made a year ago didn't result in any changes in the classroom.

Bishop was denied tenure last year and was in her final semester when she was accused of shooting her colleagues to death Friday.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP's earlier story is below.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — When police finally tracked down Amy Bishop on the day she shot and killed her teenage brother in 1986, she was crouching behind a parked car, carrying a shotgun at waist level with one round in the chamber and a second in her pocket.

The details come from police reports released Tuesday, as law enforcement officials said there
was probable cause to file weapons and assault charges against her at the time of the shooting at the family's home in Braintree, Mass.

Details of the 1986 death and its investigation have surfaced since Bishop, a biology professor at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, was arrested and charged in a university shooting rampage at a faculty meeting Friday that left three people dead and three injured. Relatives of victims in last week's shooting have questioned whether much of the violence could have been prevented if the earlier case had been handled properly.

Bishop's past encounters with the law have also included 2002 charges for a fight over a child's booster seat at an International House of Pancakes and her questioning in an attempted pipe bombing in 1993.

The newly released police reports from the 1986 shooting had been sought since the Alabama shooting. After reviewing them, Norfolk, Mass., District Attorney William Keating said Bishop could have been arrested on charges of assault with a dangerous weapon, carrying a dangerous weapon and unlawful possession of ammunition. Even so, Keating said, the police reports don't necessarily contradict Bishop's mother's claim that the shooting of 18-year-old Seth Bishop was an accident. Also, the statute of limitations has expired.

U.S. Rep. William Delahunt, D-Mass., who was the district attorney at the time, said Wednesday he has limited memory of the shooting. He spoke with The Associated Press in Tel Aviv, Israel, where he is traveling and said his former first assistant was in charge of the case and has responded to questions about it.
"I understand I haven't had a real opportunity to get into the details of the case but I suspect when I return I'll have an opportunity to become debriefed and I know there have been statements but I'm not really in a position to see any records," Delahunt said.

The reports say Bishop told officers she came downstairs from her bedroom at their home in suburban Braintree, Mass., to get help unloading a shotgun. As she walked into the kitchen, she said, her mother told her not to point the gun at anyone and she turned and the gun went off, striking her brother in the chest.

They also detail for the first time how she was detained. Bishop had fled with the gun, and two officers tracked her down outside a car dealership near her home. As one officer asked Bishop to put the gun down, a second officer, using a truck as cover, moved within about 5 feet of Bishop.

"I drew my service revolver and yelled three times drop the rifle," Officer Timothy Murphy wrote. "After the third time she did."

Police examined the shotgun and found it loaded with a 12-gauge round. A second round was discovered in her pocket.

Bishop, a 44-year-old, Harvard-educated neurobiologist, was under extra guard at an Alabama jail, charged with capital murder and attempted murder. She could face the death penalty, although the local prosecutor said he has not yet decided whether to pursue capital punishment
Killed were Gopi K. Podila, the chairman of the Department of Biological Sciences, and professors Adriel Johnson and Maria Ragland Davis. Two were wounded — professor Joseph Leahy remained in critical condition and staffer Stephanie Monticciolo was in serious condition Tuesday. The third, Luis Cruz-Vera, was released from the hospital.

The shootings erupted in the middle of a regular monthly faculty meeting. Assistant professor Joseph Ng, one of a dozen people at the meeting, said Bishop drew a gun and opened fire.

Bishop was targeting faculty members sitting closest to her, Ng said. As his injured colleagues went down, he and other survivors dived under the conference room table.

Then, within seconds, the shooting stopped, because her weapon had apparently jammed.

The lull gave the survivors an opportunity. Debra Moriarity, a biochemistry professor, scrambled toward Bishop and urged her to stop shooting, Ng said. Bishop aimed the gun directly at her and pulled the trigger, but it failed to shoot, he said.

Moriarity then led the charge that forced Bishop out the door.

"Moriarity was probably the one that saved our lives. She was the one that initiated the rush," Ng said. "It took a lot of guts to just go up to her."

Moriarity said Bishop pointed the gun at her and tried to shoot several times. "I know I yelled at her, 'Amy, think about my grandson, think about my daughter,'" she told ABC's "Good Morning America" in an interview aired Wednesday.

"She looked like she was intent on doing this, and she was angry," Moriarity said.
After Bishop was pushed out of the room, the faculty members propped the conference room table against the door and called 911. Then they braced for her to return, but Bishop never came back — and Ng still isn't quite sure why.

"She could have killed everyone in the room," said Ng. "It could have been much worse."

Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, were also questioned in 1993 by investigators looking into a pipe bomb sent to one of Bishop's colleagues, Dr. Paul Rosenberg, at Children's Hospital Boston. The bomb did not go off, and nobody was ever charged.

Then in 2002, Bishop was charged with assault, battery and disorderly conduct after a tirade at the International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. Peabody police Capt. Dennis Bonaiuto said that Bishop became incensed when she found out another woman had received the restaurant's last booster seat. Bishop hit the woman while shouting, "I am Dr. Amy Bishop," according to the police report.

Bonaiuto said Bishop admitted to the assault in court, and the case was adjudicated — meaning the charges were eventually dismissed.

Some victims' relatives have questioned how Bishop was hired in 2003 after she was involved in previous criminal investigations, but University President David B. Williams and others defended the decision to hire her. He said a review of her personnel file and her hiring file raised no red flags.

Police ran a criminal background check Monday, he said, after she was charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder.
Even now, nothing came up," Williams said.

LeBlanc reported from Boston. Associated Press writers Desiree Hunter and Jay Reeves in Huntsville, Bob Johnson in Montgomery, Mark Pratt in Boston, Ashley Thomas in Philadelphia, Devlin Barrett in Washington and Aron Heller in Tel Aviv contributed to this report.

[trimmonthelake]

http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/02/witness_cops_didnt_follow_up_after_bishop_threatned.php?ref=fpb

Witness: Cops Didn't Follow Up After Bishop Threatened Me With Gun In '86
Justin Elliott | February 17, 2010, 10:05AM
A man who was working at the newspaper distribution center where police apprehended a fleeing Amy Bishop after she killed her brother in 1986 tells TPMmuckraker that investigators never followed up with him, even though Bishop had threatened him with a shotgun, demanding to know if he had a car.

The revelation is at least the second -- and possibly the third -- known instance of Bishop pointing her gun at people she encountered after fleeing her home. And it provides more evidence of possible police missteps in the investigation of the shooting of Seth Bishop -- which was ruled an accident, mainly on the word of Seth and Amy's mother.

Bishop was abruptly released on the day of the shooting, purportedly because she was "too emotional" to be questioned. Investigators didn't speak to her until 11 days after the incident. A state police report concluding the incident was an accident has been criticized as deficient and does not mention the fact that Bishop threatened passersby after fleeing the scene.
The Norfolk County District Attorney said yesterday there was probable cause to charge Bishop with crimes including assault with a dangerous weapon in 1986, but charges were not pursued for reasons that are still unclear.

The witness who spoke to TPMmuckraker was 16 at the time, working at a Boston Globe distribution center called Village News. It was on Washington Street in Braintree, Mass, just a few blocks from Bishop's home. He requested anonymity to avoid the spotlight on his family.

He says he saw Bishop, 21, that day walking across Parkingway St. from the newspaper center, with a gun. Standing in the door, he yelled out to his coworkers over the sound of a newspaper bundling machine, that there was a girl with a gun outside.

Bishop came over and, "from 15 or 20 feet away, she pointed the gun right at me, and she said, 'Do you have a car?'" He put his hands up.

"And I said, 'I don't have a car.'"

"She was so close, I'll never forget her face," he says. "She was obviously upset, nervously looking around."

After he yelled for a coworker to hand over the keys to his car, the sound of a police siren filled the air and Bishop dashed away around the building.
A short time later, Bishop appeared right at the entrance of the newspaper center, and that's where officers apprehended her. "Drop your f***ing gun," the witness remembers one officer shouting repeatedly.

A local police report from the time, released Monday after we spoke to the witness, corroborates his claim that Bishop was arrested outside the newspaper office, and that an officer yelled at Bishop to drop the gun. The other details of the witness' story could not be independently verified.

The witness says the police simply never showed interest in talking him or the other employees of the newspaper office who saw Bishop threaten him with the gun. "If there was an investigation, it didn't extend to the people who were in the newspaper building," he says.

A spokesman for the Braintree Police Department declined to comment.

The witness' account of Bishop's threat is in line with the picture painted in the local police report and recent news accounts of her frantically fleeing the scene of the shooting, looking for a car. A man who worked at the auto body shop adjacent to Village News told the Boston Herald that Bishop pointed her gun at him as she was looking through the shop to find a car.

And, according to the current Braintree police chief, one of the police officers who was on the scene remembered Bishop pointing the gun at a motorist "in an attempt to get the driver to stop." That incident is not mentioned in the contemporaneous police report, nor is the interaction between Bishop and the Village News employee.

Thomas Pettigrew, the man who says he was held up at the auto body shop, says police talked to him after the incident, "but he never heard from them again," according to the the Herald.

[trimmonthelake]

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/authors/the_novels_of_amy_bishop_university_of_alabama_shooting_suspect__152377.asp
The Novels of Amy Bishop, University of Alabama Shooting Suspect
By Jason Boog on Feb 17, 2010 05:23 PM
gawkerlogo23.pngJournalists around the country have focused on the life of neurobiologist Amy Bishop--the suspect arrested for the murder of three of her University of Alabama colleagues.

Now, investigations have turned to Bishop's work as a novelist. Earlier this week the Boston Globe reported that Bishop had written three novels and is related to novelist John Irving.

Gawker did some more digging to find what may be one of her novels, a science fiction book entitled: If Bullets Were Gold. Here's an excerpt from the post: "We did a search of the U.S. Copyright Office's records show that in 1999, someone named Amy Bishop Anderson registered the copyright for a 260-page book called The Martian Experiment. At the time, Amy Bishop was a 34-year-old molecular biologist and biochemist at the Harvard School of Public Health living in Ipswich. She participated in a workshop called the Hamilton Writer's Group."

In addition, the Boston Globe uncovered an excerpt from a manuscript entitled Amazon Fever: "The book's heroine, Olivia, is trying to make it as a scientist during a pandemic, struggling mightily against depression and fear of losing tenure. She muses about the poet Sylvia Plath and her suicide -- and continually worries about her future."

[Nut44x4]

  I wonder what else there is that could be told about Amy Bishop?   

We've got the shooting at U of Alabama
We've got the fatal shooting of Amy's brother Seth
We've got the pipe bomb questions
We've got Amy punching a mother in the head while she held a baby(assault & battery charge & being disorderly person)

Again, I wonder what else there is that could be told about Amy Bishop?

Surely there must be more ....
Sad thing is...if she had been convicted in her brother's killing in 86' and sentenced to LIFE w/o parole...none of the rest ever would have happened. I see mega lawsuits ahead.

[Nut44x4]

The Norfolk District Attorney's Office released a statement that said, after reviewing the recently found files, probable cause existed to arrest Bishop. But, at the time, the death was declared accidental. The statute of limitations on those charges ran out in 1992, the statement said.

Excerpts from the statement:

The reports supply significant additional details into the incident and the circumstances of the apprehension of Amy Bishop. The reports do not contradict the previously released information regarding the sole eye witness, the victim's mother, who told police at the time that she directly observed the shotgun in her daughter's hands discharge accidentally, striking and killing Seth Bishop. ...

Mayor Sullivan further stated: "A review of Braintree municipal records also revealed that Amy Bishop's mother was one of 240 elected Town Meeting members. She represented Precinct 3 from 1980 to 1993. She served one year (1985) on the Braintree Arts Lottery Council, with her husband. There is no indication in town records that she served on the Personnel Board or any other elected or appointed office."
http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/02/massachusetts_district_attorne.html

[Nut44x4]

Her mother covered for her in 86' to keep her out of jail. She probably didn't want to lose another child...


My mother would have dragged me down to the police station herself!! .....especially if I had killed my sister

[MuffyBee]

Her mother covered for her in 86' to keep her out of jail. She probably didn't want to lose another child...


My mother would have dragged me down to the police station herself!! .....especially if I had killed my sister

    My mom would have too, under those circumstances.

[MuffyBee]

http://www.patriotledger.com/news/x590378193/Friends-recall-brilliant-young-man

Friends recall ‘brilliant’ young man
Painful memories return for Seth Bishop’s childhood pal



Seth Bishop's yearbook photo from 1986.

 By Fred Hanson
The Patriot Ledger
Posted Feb 18, 2010 @ 07:06 AM
Last update Feb 18, 2010 @ 10:53 AM
BRAINTREE —

Dan Shaw can’t drive past the time capsule in front of town hall without thinking about his friend Seth Bishop.

Inside the time capsule is a drawing Bishop did when he was a student at the Hollis Elementary School. The capsule is scheduled to be opened in 2076, the nation’s 300th birthday.

Shaw recalls telling Bishop, “We’ll all be long gone, and your art will still be in the time capsule.”

Bishop has been gone for more than 23 years now, shot by his sister Amy in the kitchen of the family’s Hollis Avenue home on Dec. 6, 1986. Authorities ruled the shooting accidental.

“I still mourn my friend,” Shaw said. “To this day, I miss the guy.”

A year younger than Seth Bishop, Shaw grew up a block away from the Hollis Avenue house and still lives in the neighborhood.

He remembers climbing the tree in the Bishops’ front yard with Seth, lending him comic books, and playing the game “Dungeons and Dragons” with him.

The media spotlight on Seth’s death following the arrest of Amy Bishop for allegedly killing three of her University of Alabama-Huntsville colleagues has brought back “a lot of painful memories” for Shaw.

He believes Seth’s shooting was an accident.

“It was just a horrible accident that happened at the time,” Shaw said. “There was no intent. Seth was a brilliant young man who died before his time in a stupid accident. The kid had so much promise.”

He recalled seeing Amy Bishop at Seth’s wake.

“She was absolutely hysterical,” Shaw remembers. “She was bawling her eyes out, being held up by her parents.”

From the time he spent in the Bishops’ home, he remembers the family as “nice people. I don’t remember a lot of arguing and fighting.”

He recalls that Samuel Bishop, Seth and Amy’s father, bought a shotgun after the family home was broken into during the funeral of a relative. It was the gun that Amy fired within feet of her brother, killing him.

Both Samuel and Seth Bishop had state firearm identification cards.

Shaw said he knew Amy just to say hello. As for Seth, Shaw said: “He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. He never spoke a bad word about anyone.’’

Shaw said he would see the Bishops on occasion after Seth’s death, but it he said it was too painful for any of them to do more than acknowledge each other.

Shaw noted that the Bishops stayed in the home where Seth died for several years after the shooting. Judy Bishop remained active in the community, serving as a town meeting member until 1993.

“They weren’t hiding from anyone,” Shaw said.

Braintree Town Clerk Joseph Powers went to school with Seth Bishop from kindergarten through high school. Their birthdays a day apart, they celebrated them together in their elementary classes.

“He had an absolutely brilliant mind,” Powers said. “He had exceptional gifts with science and with certainly with music.”

Amy and Seth Bishop both played the violin, and Powers described Seth as a virtuoso even at an early age.

“I remember him playing the violin in the third grade and the teachers were in awe of his ability,” Powers said.

As for his reaction at the time of Seth’s death, Powers remembers the shock.

“Those of us who grew up with Seth are reminded of the terrible death he endured and the gifts that were lost,” he said.

U.S. Rep. William Delahunt, the Norfolk County district attorney at the time of the shooting, told the Associated Press on Wednesday that he has a very limited memory of the Bishop case. The Quincy Democrat, who is traveling in Israel, said he expects to be briefed on the details when he returns to the United States.

[MuffyBee]

http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2010/02/delahunt_im_not.html
Delahunt: I'm not really in a position to see any records

[MuffyBee]

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0210/33099.html

Shooting becomes issue for Delahunt

By JAMES HOHMANN | 2/17/10

Rep. Bill Delahunt is under fire by an opponent who says Delahunt took a pass on prosecuting Amy Bishop.  Photo: AP


Last week’s shooting rampage at the University of Alabama has become a political issue for Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.), as one of his opponents is claiming that Delahunt took a pass on prosecuting the alleged shooter when he was a district attorney in the 1980s.
More...

[MuffyBee]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/us/16alabama.html

After a Shooting, Colleagues Try to Regain Footing


From left, Gopi Podila, Adriel Johnson and Maria Ragland Davis were killed in the shooting Friday at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. Luis Cruz-Vera and Joseph Leahy were wounded.

By SHAILA DEWAN and KATIE ZEZIMA
Published: February 15, 2010

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — When after many months of careful tending, Sarah Cseke reached a milestone in her graduate student research, she went straight to the office of the busy chairman of the biology department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Gopi Podila, to share the triumphal moment.
I knocked on his door with a petri dish full of hairy roots, and he actually came to the door and took the time to look at it,” she said. “He was just as happy as I was.”

On Friday, the biology department at the university lost Dr. Podila, 52, and two other faculty members in a hail of gunfire at an afternoon faculty meeting. A colleague with a Harvard Ph.D., Amy Bishop, is charged with capital murder. Another professor and the department administrator are still in the hospital in critical condition.

The deaths have left a small, close-knit department trying to pick up the pieces without either its leader, Dr. Podila, or the person colleagues described as its “glue,” Stephanie Monticciolo, 62, the administrator, who doles out hugs and birthday reminders. Ms. Monticciolo is in the hospital with a gunshot wound to the head.

The two other people killed were Maria Ragland Davis, 50, and Adriel Johnson, 52, described as professors who spent hours of extra time helping students. A colleague, Joseph Leahy, 50, a microbiology professor known for his zesty lectures, remained hospitalized with a head wound.

“They will leave a large hole in our department,” said Debra Moriarity, a biology professor and the dean of the university’s graduate program.

A third member of the department, Luis Cruz-Vera, was released from the hospital over the weekend.

When Dr. Podila, a native of India, arrived nine years ago to build the university’s biotechnology program, colleagues had to struggle to find him vegetarian meals. He and his wife, Vani, quickly became well known in Huntsville’s Indian community, arranging performances and, together, choreographing traditional Indian dances. He had two teenage daughters.

Dr. Podila was described as an enthusiastic administrator with a research interest in biofuels and the symbiotic relationship between fungi and trees. But he was just as interested in human symbiosis, said Joseph Ng, a fellow professor. “He was always encouraging collaborative efforts,” Dr. Ng said.

Dr. Johnson, who was married to a veterinarian, was from Tuskegee, Ala. He had two sons, one in college and one in high school, with whom he had recently been visiting colleges. His research focused on diabetes. On campus, he was the director of the Louis B. Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, and he also screened and helped students who wanted to go to medical school.

His desire to make sure minority students succeeded made him a stern but fatherly figure, colleagues said.

Dr. Davis, an enthusiastic gardener who was married and had three stepchildren, came to the campus from one of the city’s prominent biotechnology companies, Research Genetics. James Hudson, who started the company, said he had hired her away from Alabama A&M, where she was doing postdoctoral research. He said she had wanted to improve agriculture in developing countries by creating plants that could thrive in inferior soil.

In an interview on “Good Morning America” on ABC, Melissa Davis, Dr. Davis’s stepdaughter, said the family had still been recovering from the death of her mother when her father remarried. “We didn’t want to open our hearts quickly because we loved our mom so much, and Maria came in with this gentle and kind heart,” Ms. Davis said. “She just brought this life back.”

On Monday, officials in Massachusetts continued to pore over Dr. Bishop’s past, including a 1986 case in which she killed her brother with a shotgun. The shooting was declared accidental, but questions are being raised about it again. The revelation that she and her husband were questioned in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard colleague has also drawn interest.

John Polio, the former police chief in Braintree, Mass., who came under criticism for not pursuing charges in the shooting, said Monday that while he stood by the decision, he had come to wonder in light of the Huntsville killings and the pipe bomb investigation.

“You put them all together and it does make you doubt just what happened and how it happened,” Mr. Polio said. “You have to be more than a psychiatrist to figure that one out. I don’t think anybody can really get a handle on it. These things happen, and they happen to people we least suspect they could happen to.”

Also Monday, Dr. Bishop’s husband, James Anderson, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that his wife had borrowed the 9-millimeter handgun found near the shooting site and that he had gone with her to an indoor shooting range in recent weeks. He had previously said the family did not own a gun.

[MuffyBee]

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2010/0218/Beat-up-cars-and-neuron-computers-broken-dream-of-Amy-Bishop

Beat-up cars and neuron computers: broken 'dream' of Amy Bishop?

The emerging portrait of neurobiologist and murder suspect Amy Bishop shows a disconnect between how she saw herself and her life and the actual reality of her experience.

By Patrik Jonsson Staff writer / February 18, 2010

Neurobiologist Amy Bishop, the suspect in last week's shooting of six scholars at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, liked to talk up her relationship to Harvard and the writer John Irving (a second cousin), but didn’t want her writing buddies to see that she drove a beat-up Chrysler.
After confronting a woman at a fast-food restaurant in 2002 for taking the last booster seat, Dr. Bishop, a mother of four, punched her while yelling, “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!”

And after decades spent climbing the rungs of academe only to be denied tenure, Bishop allegedly responded to others' failure to recognize her achievements as she saw fit by pulling out a 9 mm semi-automatic handgun at a faculty hearing, opening fire, and emptying bullets until the gun jammed and clicked in the face of a colleague.

A disconnect between Bishop's actual life experience and the life of success and recognition she evidently expected is a recurring theme in the case of the woman with the dark past. Bishop’s husband, James Anderson, has told the press that his wife has had no mental health issues. But legal experts expect Bishop to plead insanity to several charges of murder and attempted murder.

“You have to talk about Amy Bishop’s mental health in this situation as one of the variables, but being denied tenure when you’re in your mid-40s at an out-of-the-way obscure rural campus in the deep South is a catastrophic loss, and people don’t understand that,” says Jack Levin, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “If you’re denied tenure, you’re fired. And in this economy chances are you’ll have to change your career, which is pretty hard for a woman who’s spent a decade in graduate school on a prestigious campus, Harvard, and had a good reputation for scholarship. Where is she going to go?”

Revelations that Bishops was a suspect in two previous violent acts – an unsuccessful mail-bomb attack on a Harvard professor and the fatal shooting in 1986 of her younger brother, Seth Bishop (ruled an accident) – have prompted a closer look at her patterns of behavior. The portrait that is emerging is of an “oddball” whose ideal of family and career may be, as a character in Bishop's unpublished novel says, “just a dream.”

Criminologists say that Bishop, a mother in her 40s, bucked nearly all existing profiles of mass killers last Friday when she opened fire on a roomful of colleagues at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, one of NASA’s civilian space hubs. Three colleagues were killed and three others seriously injured.

Bishop had been denied tenure at the state research university, a decision she had appealed. The increasingly competitive hunt for research money and the requirement of strong academic connections in that quest are being widely discussed as possible motives. Bishop had been working on a "living computer" built from mammalian neurons at the time of the shooting.

Now, The Boston Globe’s unearthing of an unpublished Bishop novel, “Amazon Fever,” gives another glimpse into Bishop’s state of mind. [] The novel, writes the Globe’s Meghan Irons, “is peppered with references to Harvard … and follows Olivia to Alabama, where she struggles to save a flagging career.… Through it all are Olivia’s anxieties about achieving success as a scientist.”

“She was here to save her career, which was flagging in perpetual postdoctoral fellowship,’’ Bishop wrote. Bishop sent the novel, which she evidently had been working on for years, to a friend in Massachusetts about six months ago, according to the Globe report.

Prosecutors are considering the death penalty.

[MuffyBee]

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/02/18/professors_say_tenure_fights_create_high_stress_situations/

Professors say tenure fights create high-stress situations
Bishop case puts focus on mental health monitoring
By Tracy Jan
 February 18, 2010
As the Amy Bishop investigation continues, local professors say that the sensational twists and turns in the case should not obscure the role that the intense competition for tenure seems to have played in last week’s shooting at the University of Alabama campus in Huntsville.
More...

[trimmonthelake]

http://www1.whdh.com/news/articles/local/BO135918/
Local doctor targeted by Bishop speaks out
Posted:  Today at 6:20 pm EST      Last Updated:  Today at 6:35 pm EST
BOSTON -- A local doctor targeted nearly 17 years ago by the suspect in a campus rampage in Alabama is speaking out.

In 1993, Amy Bishop was questioned about two bombs sent to the home of Dr. Paul Rosenberg. Both had been working together in a lab at Children's Hospital Boston. Bishop was reportedly concerned about receiving a negative evaluation from Rosenberg.

He and his wife on Thursday extended their sympathies to those affected by the shooting, saying in a statement:

"As has been reported, I was targeted with a bomb sent through the mail to our home in 1993. We called the police who alerted federal authorities. Amy bishop and her husband were questioned but were never charged. We hope that there is a thorough investigation into this recent crime, so that no one else will be victimized by such senseless violence."

Dr. Gopi Podila, Dr. Adriel Johnson and Dr. Maria Ragland Davis were all killed in the shooting spree. The first of three funerals takes place on Thursday.

Bishop, who is currently in jail, is charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder in connection with the shooting last week at the University of Alabama in Huntsville.

A witness says a meeting had been going on for about half an hour when Bishop took out a gun and started shooting.

The biology professor's students reportedly complained last year that her classroom behavior was odd and that she rarely looked people in the eye while talking.

[MuffyBee]

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/02/hold_for_postin.html
Official: No exoneration letter sent to Bishop or husband in 1993 bomb case
February 18, 2010
Federal law enforcement officials did not send Amy Bishop and her husband a letter telling them they were cleared in the 1993 mail bombing investigation of a Harvard Medical School professor, an official said today, contradicting statements Bishop's husband has made to the media since his wife was charged in an Alabama shooting rampage.

"No letter was ever sent,'' said the law enforcement official, who is not authorized to speak publicly on the case.

Bishop's husband, James E. Anderson, has acknowledged the couple were both questioned by federal investigators after a package containing two pipe bombs was sent to the Newton home of the professor, Dr. Paul Rosenberg, who was also a physician at Children's Hospital Boston.

Bishop had worked as a postdoctoral research fellow in the hospital's neurobiology lab under the supervision of Rosenberg and another doctor and left that job several weeks before the attempted bombing, the hospital has acknowledged.

Anderson told the Globe recently that he and his wife had been questioned in the attempted mail bombing. He said neither of them was a suspect, but rather, they were "subjects'' of the investigation.

It was "just a matter of questioning, being bothered, harassed. You know the usual techniques, that's all,'' Anderson told the Globe.

Anderson also told The New York Times that the lead investigative agency, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, notified the couple in writing that their role in the investigation had ended. The agency is often known by the acronym, ATF.

"In my files I have a letter from the ATF saying, 'You are hereby cleared in this incident. You are no longer a subject of the investigation.''' Anderson told the Times.

Anderson didn't immediately return a phone message seeking comment today.

Rosenberg had just returned home from a Caribbean vacation with his wife on Dec. 19, 1993 when he was opening a package addressed to "Mr. Paul Rosenberg M.D." that had been brought inside with the rest of the mail by his cat-sitter. When he saw wires and a cylinder inside, he and his wife fled the house and called police.

At the time, police said the bomb would have exploded and killed Rosenberg and anyone in the vicinity if he had opened the end flaps of the package. They said the bombs didn't detonate because Rosenberg had opened the package by cutting around the top of it with a knife.

During the 1990s the so-called Unabomber, who sent bombs to university professors, airline officials, computer scientists and other targets, was also the target of a massive FBI-led investigation.

In December 1993, the Globe reported that Terence McArdle, who was then special agent in charge of the ATF's New England office, said the investigation pointed away from the Unabomber because there were no structural similarities between the bomb sent to Rosenberg and the sophisticated devices recovered from incidents attributed to the Unabomber.

The Unabomber, Theodore Kaczynski, was arrested in Montana in 1996 and later pleaded guilty to 16 mail bombings between 1978 and 1995 that killed three people and injured 23.

[MuffyBee]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/18/AR2010021804067.html
Alabama shooting puts spotlight on tenure process
By ERIC GORSKI
The Associated Press
Thursday, February 18, 2010
 While the circumstances behind the deadly shooting at the University of Alabama-Huntsville remain unclear, the Harvard-trained neurobiologist accused in the rampage was upset about being denied tenure - the academic world's highly coveted form of job security.

The profile of Amy Bishop that is emerging suggests deep-seated emotional problems and a history of violence. But her vocal displeasure about being rejected in the period leading up to the attack has cast a spotlight on the increasingly pressure-packed quest for tenure at American colleges.

Within the academic world, there's little debate that the trials of tenure have grown more intense in recent years - largely because there are fewer opportunities to gain an academic foothold, greater expectations for scholarly output and an economic climate that is anything but rosy.

"You remember it almost like a death in the family," said John Tisdale, a journalism professor who was denied tenure at Baylor University in 2002 for reasons that he said were never fully explained.

"I know this happens to people every day, so I don't want to sound melodramatic ... It's so traumatic. Your life is turned upside down. Obviously it's a professional setback, but it's personal, too."

Decades ago, schools were hiring, and tenure was almost automatic. Now, cost-conscious colleges and universities are turning to part-time and adjunct faculty who will never get a shot at tenure. Some live like academic nomads, drifting from position to position with marginal pay or benefits.
Professors lucky enough to land tenure-track positions must endure rigorous scrutiny and, at times, an ambiguous process deciding their fate. Those who wash out wear the scarlet letter of academia. Although some fail to regain their footing, others go on to success in the classroom or the business world.

Tisdale joined Baylor University as adviser to the student newspaper in 1987 and earned his master's and Ph.D. while working full time. He was put on the tenure track in 1996. Although his reviews were good and nothing seemed out of the ordinary, Tisdale lost his bid for tenure.

The former newspaper reporter and copy editor appealed the decision, but he also started a job search almost immediately. While he could have stayed at Baylor another year, he accepted a position at Texas Christian University and is now a tenured professor and associate director of the journalism school.

"You hate to say this, but failure is a great teacher, and you learn your lesson and go forward," Tisdale said.

Bishop is accused in the attack last week that killed three fellow professors. Because of her field, she had brighter future career prospects than many other scholars rejected for tenure. According to one report, one of the victims was a professor who supported her tenure bid.

A tenure dispute being linked to violence, let alone deaths, is practically unheard of. In 1992, an associate professor who had been denied tenure at Concordia University in Montreal killed four colleagues.
t's a shock to be denied tenure "when your entire sense of self and your intellectual life is tied into your perception of yourself as an academic," said Cat Warren, a tenured associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. "It is a rigorous process, and it's difficult."

But, Warren added: "You have to admit, life these days is generally difficult. I mean, everybody works under stressful situations. There's danger in drawing any sort of lesson from this clearly tragic case."

Defenders of tenure, which makes firing and discipline difficult, say job protection gives professors the freedom to express ideas and conduct studies without fear of reprisal, ultimately benefiting students.

While the number of tenure-track positions grew by 7 percent between 1975 and 2007, non-tenure track jobs more than tripled, according to the American Association of University Professors. The recession has turned up the pressure, said Cary Nelson, president of the association and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Your most coldly accurate expectation would be, if you don't get tenure, you'd better look for another career," he said.

William Tierney, director of the Center for Higher Education Policy Analysis at the University of Southern California, said tenure is stressful for all involved in part "because it is by its very nature marked by ambiguity. The criteria are not crystal clear about what it takes to get it."

The typical criteria for awarding tenure are teaching, scholarship and service, meaning things like serving on committees and advising student groups. Some schools put a premium on scholarly publications and a professor's success in landing research grants, while others make teaching a priority in awarding tenure.

Tierney said faculty can get conflicting messages from school presidents and department chairs about what's important. Then, when someone is rejected for tenure after six years on campus and is given another year to stick around and job-hunt, "there is sort of a sense of dead man walking," he said.

"Oftentimes I don't think the academic community has thought through what we need to do to help someone ... both with their mental health and their future," he said.

Experts say the bar is higher to achieve tenure, but that's been the case for several years. In the 1960s, the concern was "tenure by default" - that faculty were being awarded for just sticking around, said Gregory Scholtz, director of the American Association of University Professors' department of academic freedom, tenure, and governance.

Now, it's not uncommon for tenure candidates to turn in portfolios 2 or 3 feet high stacked with teaching evaluations, syllabuses, examples of course materials, scholarship and explanations of their teaching philosophy, Scholtz said.

Along with citing deficiencies in the three traditional tenure criteria, schools turn down candidates because they cannot justify the hire financially, Scholtz said. Other faculty have been deemed not "collegial" enough - not getting along with others to a fault.

The fact that expectations have risen in the past 25 years for earning tenure is a positive development, said Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education.

"Higher education in general should not be static," she said. "We're constantly trying to improve learning and knowledge and research and teaching."

Tenure-related litigation increased with the advent of anti-discrimination laws, but there's been no noticeable change in volume in recent years, said Robb Jones, senior vice president and general counsel of United Educators, an insurance company owned and operated by more than 1,160 schools and organizations.

It's believed most tenure-track professors achieve tenure, but there's a dearth of solid data.

Academics denied tenure can have a hard time getting tenure-track positions elsewhere - unless they are coming from an Ivy League school or other elite institution. Most who stick with academics patch together part-time appointments at other local schools, community colleges or for-profit schools, Scholtz said.

Others go on to successful careers. Bishop was better positioned than, say, a classics professor denied tenure. While at Huntsville, she developed a new type of portable cell incubator and won $25,000 in a statewide business competition in 2007. The school has not disclosed why she was denied tenure.

[MuffyBee]

http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/02/18/da_rips_gap_in_bishop_report/
DA rips gap in Bishop report
He says omission of standoff ‘glaring’
By Maria Cramer and Shelley Murphy
Globe Staff / February 18, 2010
The Norfolk district attorney ramped up his criticism of the 1986 investigation of Seth Bishop’s death yesterday, saying that it was “glaring’’ and “striking’’ that local police accounts of Amy Bishop’s armed standoff at a local business were not included in the State Police report or considered as part of the prosecutor’s decision about whether to pursue charges.
“It was a glaring omission that . . . there wasn’t the inclusion of the shooter who exited her house with a gun, leveling the gun at an innocent bystander, and making demands on that bystander,’’ William R. Keating said in a telephone interview.

Although Braintree police had documented in great detail how Bishop had pointed a 12-gauge shotgun at two employees at a local auto body shop and demanded a getaway car, there is no indication in the final State Police report that they shared this information with the troopers who worked out of the district attorney’s office and were assigned to the case.

Keating also revealed yesterday that the state trooper who wrote the report, Brian L. Howe, has told investigators in Keating’s office that he “did not have a recollection’’ of Braintree police telling him of the incident. That backs up the repeated assertions of the assistant district attorney assigned to the 1986 case, who also said he was never made aware of the second assault.

Last Friday, 23 years after Bishop escaped charges in the shooting death of her brother and her armed encounter at the body shop, police say the Harvard-educated neurobiologist fatally shot three of her colleagues at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and injured three others.

In the aftermath, a series of troubling questions have been raised about how the Braintree case was handled, with several key figures in the investigation - including former Braintree police chief John Polio - saying they were unaware of crucial facts surrounding the death of 18-year-old Seth Bishop.

Keating said yesterday that he was confounded by Polio’s admission that he did not know Bishop had pointed her firearm at a mechanic and demanded a getaway car. These details were included in Braintree police reports made public on Tuesday after they had previously been declared missing.

“The report reflects what his own police officers saw,’’ Keating said. “And if he’s saying that he wasn’t aware that Amy Bishop took a loaded shotgun and pointed it at an innocent bystander, I find that astounding. He’s saying he didn’t read his own [officers’] reports.’’

Polio acknowledged yesterday that he read the reports of his own officers for the first time when they were released by Keating’s office this week. Polio said he did not read the reports in 1986 because his officers told him the case would be handled by State Police and the district attorney’s office.
“I’m not fingerpointing at anybody,’’ Polio said. “I know what part I played and what I did, but the lines of communication broke somewhere. I have no regrets whatsoever.’’
US Representative William D. Delahunt, who was Norfolk district attorney at the time of the 1986 shooting, has been in Israel since the Alabama shootings, but was questioned about the case yesterday at a press availability called after the congressional delegation was blocked from entering Gaza.

“I haven’t had a real opportunity to get into the details of the case, but I suspect when I return I’ll have an opportunity to become debriefed,’’ the congressman told the Associated Press.

Braintree Police Chief Paul Frazier first raised concerns about the handling of the investigation during a Saturday press conference. Yesterday, an assistant in his office referred calls to Braintree’s mayor, Joseph Sullivan, who declined to comment on Keating’s remarks.

Sullivan said town officials worked through the weekend to find the Braintree police reports, which Frazier said had been missing for more than 20 years. They were ultimately found in a box at the police station among the papers of an investigator on the case, who has since died.

“I wanted to get the facts out as quick as we could,’’ Sullivan said.

On Sunday, the Globe, citing an anonymous law enforcement official, reported that Bishop and her husband were questioned in the attempted bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in 1993. Investigators searched the home Bishop shared with her husband, but no one was ever charged in the crime.

Bishop’s husband, James Anderson, acknowledged that he and his wife had been questioned, but he told the New York Times that he had been given a letter from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that said: “You are hereby cleared in this incident. You are no longer a subject of the investigation.’’

However, Michael J. Sullivan, who served as US attorney for Massachusetts from 2001 to 2009 and had been acting director of the ATF, said it is extremely unusual for federal officials to write such a letter unless the suspects or those questioned were publicly linked to the case. The names of Bishop and her husband were never publicly linked to the case until after Friday’s shootings.

“There probably were one or two times during my career as a federal and state prosecutor where I felt an obligation to give that type of letter because a person’s reputation was harmed through no fault of their own and there was an exoneration of the individual,’’ said Sullivan, who emphasized that he had no personal knowledge of the Bishop case.

On Tuesday, Keating said Bishop should have been charged with assault with a dangerous weapon, unlawful possession of a firearm, and unlawful possession of ammunition for pointing her shotgun at innocent bystanders. Braintree police had to order her to put down her weapon, which she did not do, forcing one officer to grab her from behind, according to the newly released reports.
Keating said the errors made in the 1986 case are the kind that shake public confidence in law enforcement.

“It’s important to go forward so that the same mistakes can’t be repeated,’’ he said.

Among those mistakes, said Keating, were letting Bishop go without questioning her the day of the shooting because police concluded she was too distraught to be interviewed and the decision by local and State Police to wait 11 days before interviewing her and her mother, the sole witnesses to the shooting.

“If you eliminated everyone from an interview that was emotionally upset after a shooting death, you’d have no one to talk to,’’ Keating said. “If someone takes a loaded shotgun, levels it at someone, and makes demands, and the person goes to the police station and gets released and there are no charges, I don’t think anyone could say that wasn’t a mistake.’’

Braintree police also should have waited for the State Police crime scene response unit to arrive at the house and allowed their troopers to take pictures and document evidence, Keating said.

According to the local police report, in the moments following the shooting, Braintree officers photographed the scene and removed evidence, like spent shells, after Howe reportedly told Captain Theodore Buker of the Braintree police that “State Police would not respond.’’ But in Howe’s six-page report, which he wrote in March 1987, he said he was directed on the day of the shooting to conduct an investigation.

It is unclear from the state and town reports when or whether State Police went to the scene that day.

Keating said it is standard procedure for smaller towns, like Braintree, to immediately hand over death investigations to the State Police and the district attorney’s office, which have more resources.

“The statutes are clear that the district attorney and the State Police attached to the district attorney have primary responsibility over the investigations of death,’’ Keating said. “There should be a clear chain of command on investigations, and as I reviewed the documents . . . based on those reports, that chain of command, that sharing of information was not there.’’

[MuffyBee]

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/2010/02/19/2010-02-19_alabama_shooter_professor_amy_bishop_is_likely_insane_lawyer.html

Professor accused in Alabama shooting, Amy Bishop, is likely insane: lawyer

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Friday, February 19th 2010, 10:28 AM

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. -- An Alabama college professor accused of killing three colleagues during a faculty meeting is likely insane, and she can't remember the shootings, her attorney said.

Roy W. Miller, the court-appointed attorney for Amy Bishop, told The Associated Press in an interview Thursday that his client has severe mental problems that appear to be paranoid schizophrenia. Miller discussed the case hours after hundreds of mourners attended the first funeral and memorial services for Bishop's slain co-workers.

Authorities said three more people were hurt when Bishop pulled out a handgun and started shooting during the routine meeting with colleagues last Friday. Charged with capital murder and attempted murder, she is being held without bond.

Miller said Bishop's failure to obtain tenure at the University of Alabama in Huntsville was likely a key to the shootings. Bishop, who has a doctorate from Harvard University and has taught at the University of Alabama in Huntsville since 2003, apparently was incensed that a lesser-known school rejected her for what amounted to a lifetime job.

"Obviously she was very distraught and concerned over that tenure," Miller said. "It insulted her and slapped her in the face, and it's probably tied in with the Harvard mentality. She brooded and brooded and brooded over it, and then, `bingo.'" From what I can see, it isn't "bingo".  She didn't snap.  She planned.  She obtained a firearm.  She practiced.  Premeditated murders JMHO

Bishop's husband, James Anderson, told ABC's "Good Morning America" he also thought the failed tenure battle was involved.

"Only someone who has been intricately involved with that fight understands what a tough, long, hard battle (it is) ... That I would say is part of the problem, is a factor," he said in an interview aired Friday.

Anderson said his wife had never taken any anger management courses, even though prosecutors asked for that when Bishop was charged with starting a fight over a booster seat at a restaurant in 2002. Anderson told ABC he didn't think she needed the course. Bishop admitted to the assault in court, and the charges were dismissed six months later. Prosecutors "asked for that". Was she supposed to take anger management courses as part of her deal with probation?  Anderson tld ABC he didn't think she neede the course?  After his wife publicly punched another woman in the head as the woman held a one year old child, and this was over a booster seat?  I think James Anderson is full of it.  Or maybe he lacks something, like good sense. JMHO

Miller said Bishop seems "very cogent" in jail, where he has spent more than three hours with her over two days, yet she also seems to realize she has a loose grip on reality.

"She gets at issue with people that she doesn't need to and obsesses on it," Miller said. "She won't shake it off, and it's really (things of) no great consequence."

Bishop, who claims an IQ of 180, can't explain the shootings, he said.

"She says she does not remember anything about it," said Miller.

The chief prosecutor in Huntsville said he would not oppose a mental evaluation for Bishop, 45.

"In this case as in all cases, if they want to start talking about a mental defense, then have at it. We'll be ready when it comes to court," said Madison County District Attorney Robert Broussard.

Miller said he expects prosecutors to seek the death penalty, but Broussard said his office hasn't decided whether to seek Bishop's execution or a sentence of life without parole if she is convicted.

"We'll wait until we have every piece of evidence in front of us to decide on that," said Broussard. He said investigators had yet to review evidence about Bishop's troubled past, including her fatal shooting of her younger brother in 1986 in a case authorities in Massachusetts ruled accidental.

In Bishop's only public comments since the slayings, the teacher said the shootings "didn't happen. There's no way."

"What about the people who died?" a reporter asked as she was led to a police car hours after the killings.

"There's no way. They're still alive," she responded.

The shooting decimated the biology department - of 14 members, six were killed or wounded, one is jailed, and the rest are dealing with the shock and loss of colleagues. Two of those shot were hospitalized in critical condition Thursday, while another who was shot in the chest has been released.

Mourners hugged and cried Thursday at a memorial service for biology department chairman Gopi K. Podila. A long line of mourners moved slowly from the funeral home lobby, down a hallway and before an open casket in the sanctuary.

He was remembered as a father figure who cared deeply about his students, the kind of professor who kept his office door open in case they needed to talk about personal problems. Former student Joy Agee recalled that he helped her overcome her anxiety about a speech to a community group by showing up in the audience.

"He told me if I got nervous during the speech to just look at him and just talk to him," she said.
Podila had supported Bishop's tenure application.

After the service for Podila, more than 100 people attended a service held by the Council on African-American Faculty for slain biology professors Adriel Johnson and Maria Ragland Davis.

Johnson had organized the council at UAH in 2004, while Davis helped promote it in recent years. The two were among seven black faculty members at the school at the time, a number that had grown to 14 prior to their deaths. Overall, the school has 340 full-time faculty members.

"We have not only lost two founding members of our group but we have also lost two of our biggest advocates," said Sonja Brown-Givens, the council's current president.

(My comments in blue-MuffyBee)

[trimmonthelake]

http://www.wickedlocal.com/braintree/news/x1650247568/Review-ordered-of-1986-Braintree-Bishop-case-investigation

Review ordered of 1986 Braintree Bishop case investigation
By Robert Aicardi
GateHouse News Service
Posted Feb 20, 2010 @ 10:55 AM
Braintree —

Gov. Deval Patrick has ordered a review of the State Police’s role in the investigation of the Dec. 6, 1986 shooting death of Sean Bishop, 18, by his older sister Amy in their Braintree home that was ruled to be accidental.

The case has been scrutinized since Amy Bishop was arrested for the shooting deaths of three colleagues and the wounding of three others during a Feb. 12 University of Alabama faculty meeting.

“It is critical that we provide as clear an understanding as possible about all aspects of this case and its investigation to ensure that where mistakes were made, they are not repeated in the future,” Patrick said in a Feb. 19 statement.

A day earlier, Norfolk County District Attorney William Keating said that his office is probing the investigation of the shooting of Seth Bishop.

“There have been mistakes in the handling of this case,” Keating said. “If there are any elements of criminality that can be prosecuted in the future, we will be doing it.”

At the direction of Patrick, earlier in the week the State Police had begun reviewing documents in its possession and assessing its role in the investigation, Public Safety Secretary Mary Beth Heffernan said in a Feb. 19 statement.

“A preliminary review indicated that most of the relevant documents are possessed by the Norfolk district attorney’s office, as the State Police investigators involved in the case were attached to that office,” she said. “ After further discussion with the district attorney’s office, this initial review will be folded into the full review being conducted by the district attorney.   The primary investigators conducting that review are troopers attached to the district attorney’s office. Furthermore, the State Police will provide additional investigative resources, as needed by the district attorney, from their Division of Investigative Services.”

Mayor Joseph Sullivan issued a statement on Feb. 19 concerning the controversy,

 “Throughout the events of this past week, the thoughts and prayers of the Town of Braintree have been with the families and the victims of the shootings at the University of Alabama at Huntsville,” he said. “The motivation for the review, retrieval, and disclosure of the records relating to the 1986 shooting of Seth Bishop has been simply to provide as much information as possible relating to an incident that happened nearly a quarter century ago. The Town of Braintree and its police department will continue to work in conjunction with the Norfolk County district attorney and other law enforcement agencies to provide any information they deem relevant. We are also committed to being transparent throughout this process and to learn from it.”

The mayor added, “I have full confidence in the integrity, fairness, and professionalism of the men and women of the current Braintree police department. I am thankful for the consistent commitment they demonstrate daily towards enhancing the safety and quality of life of our community.”

He concluded, “Life has a way of testing and tempering us all. While this past week has presented challenges for Braintree, I am steadfast in my belief that we will emerge from this experience a safer and stronger community.”

[trimmonthelake]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21bishop.html
Fury Just Beneath the Surface
Published: February 20, 2010

This article is by Shaila Dewan, Stephanie Saul and Katie Zezim
Not long after Amy Bishop was identified as the professor who had been arrested in the shooting of six faculty members at the University of Alabama in Huntsville on Feb. 12, the campus police received a series of reports even stranger than the shooting itself.

Several people with connections to the university’s biology department warned that Dr. Bishop, a neuroscientist with a Harvard Ph.D., might have booby-trapped the science building with some sort of “herpes bomb,” police officials said, designed to spread the dangerous virus.
Only people who had worked with Dr. Bishop would know that she had done work with the herpes virus as a post-doctoral student and had talked about how it could cause encephalitis. She had also written an unpublished novel in which a herpes-like virus spreads throughout the world, causing pregnant women to miscarry.

By the time of the reports, the police had already swept every room of the science building, finding nothing but a 9-millimeter handgun in the second-floor restroom.

But the anxious warnings reflected the fears of those who know Dr. Bishop that she could go to great lengths to retaliate against those she felt had wronged her.

Over the years, Dr. Bishop had shown evidence that the smallest of slights could set off a disproportionate and occasionally violent reaction, according to numerous interviews with colleagues and others who know her. Her life seemed to veer wildly between moments of cold fury and scientific brilliance, between rage at perceived slights and empathy for her students.
Her academic career slammed to a halt with the shooting rampage nine days ago against her colleagues. Dr. Bishop, 45, is accused of killing three fellow biology professors, including the department’s chairman, at a faculty meeting. Three others were wounded.

Her lawyer says she remembers nothing of the shootings and that he plans to have her evaluated by psychiatrists.

The shootings took place after Dr. Bishop learned that she had lost her long battle to gain academic tenure at the university. But they were hardly the first time that she had come to the attention of law enforcement because of an outburst or violent act.

In 2002, she was charged with assault after punching a woman in the head at an International House of Pancakes in Peabody, Mass. The woman had taken the last booster seat, and, according to the police report, Dr. Bishop demanded it for one of her children, shouting, “I am Dr. Amy Bishop!”
In 1986, not long after a family argument, Amy Bishop shot and killed her brother, Seth, 18, with her father’s 12-gauge shotgun, putting a gaping hole in his left chest and tearing open his aorta, according to the police report. She was 21 years old and, like her brother, a student at Northeastern University.

But Amy Bishop was not charged with a crime, and the shooting was never fully investigated by the police. She and her family said it was an accident, and the authorities accepted their version.

And in 1994, she and her husband were questioned in a mail bomb plot against a doctor at Harvard, where she obtained her Ph.D. and remained on and off for nearly a decade to conduct postdoctoral research.

In each brush with the law until this month, Dr. Bishop emerged unscathed, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville never knew of them. But she left behind a trail of neighbors, colleagues and acquaintances who were mystified by her mood swings and volatility.

She yelled at playing children, neighbors said, and rarely kept her opinions to herself. She rejected criticism and fudged her résumé. Her scientific work was not as impressive as she made it seem, according to independent neurobiologists, some of whom said she would
have been unlikely to even get the opportunity to try for tenure at major universities.

She was known to have cyclical “flip-outs,” as one former student described them, that pushed one graduate student after another out of her laboratory. On the day she shot and killed her brother, she ran out into the street with the shotgun and demanded a car at a local dealership.

Dr. Hugo Gonzalez-Serratos, now a professor of physiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, collaborated with Dr. Bishop on a 1996 paper while both were working in the cardiology department at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, affiliated with Harvard. When the paper was completed, Dr. Gonzalez-Serratos said, Dr. Bishop flew into a rage.