Man who killed three UNLV faculty members had held a college job, officials say

The man who shot and killed three faculty members at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on Wednesday was himself a professor who had tried and failed at various jobs at colleges in the state, authorities said Thursday.

The gunman, Anthony Polito, 67, lived in a Las Vegas suburb and was killed by police in a shootout after his rampage, officials said. Mr. Polito also shot and wounded a fourth person, a man identified as a 38-year-old visiting professor who was being treated at a hospital for life-threatening wounds.

Shortly before the shooting, the police said, Mr. Polito had sent 22 letters to employees at universities across the country, at least one of which contained an unknown white powder. The contents of the additional letters were not yet known.

Sheriff Kevin McMahill of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said Mr. Polito used a 9-millimeter handgun to carry out the attack and took 11 magazines, two of which had been emptied by the time he was killed.

The Clark County coroner’s office identified two of the people who were killed: Patricia Navarro Velez, 39, an assistant professor of accounting, and Cha Jan Chang, 64, who went by Jerry and was a professor of management information systems. Both had offices in Frank and Estella Beam Hall, where UNLV’s business school is housed and where the shooting took place on several floors.

The identity of the third faculty member who was killed was being kept secret until officials could notify the person’s family.

Mr. Polito taught at East Carolina University’s business school in Greenville, N.C., for nearly 16 years until 2017. Sheriff McMahill said police were still trying to understand the shooter’s exact motive but had a list made of people he sought out on the UNLV campus and at East Carolina University. None of these individuals were actually shot in the attack.

Mr. Polito was in financial trouble and officers found an eviction notice on his front door when they arrived at his apartment on Wednesday, the sheriff said.

The shooting roiled the campus of one of Nevada’s largest colleges – just east of the Las Vegas Strip, the main casino corridor – as students prepared for final exams scheduled for next week. The police said that Mr. Polito began shooting in the business school lobby shortly before noon on Wednesday.

A UNLV police officer arrived on campus within 78 seconds of the initial call of a gunman, and more officers soon followed and immediately entered the building, officials said.

The exact movements of the officers and the shooter were not clear — there were no security cameras in the hallways, the sheriff said — but the shooter eventually left the building about 10 minutes after the first report of gunfire. There he confronted a police officer, and the two became involved in a shootout, with the officer Mr. Polito fatally shot, based on a video shown at a news conference Thursday.

Students left the classroom when they heard gunshots and ran into the classrooms with the lights off. The business school is located in the heart of campus and next to the Student Union, where students enjoyed food and a Lego building event designed to help them relax before final exams.

Sheriff McMahill noted that the gunman still had approximately 150 rounds of ammunition on him when he was killed, and said he believed the gunman would have continued his attack on the Student Union had he not been stopped.

“I believe we averted a much greater tragedy because of the actions of that heroic police officer,” the sheriff said.

The gunman had an address at the Promontory Point Apartments in Henderson, a suburb south of Las Vegas. The stucco buildings and apartment complex were quiet on Thursday. Caution tape blocked off the part of the complex where Mr. Polito’s apartment was, next to a small swimming pool, while two police officers stood outside his building.

Michele Pearson, a 54-year-old occupational therapist who lives in a neighboring building, was watching “CSI Vegas” Wednesday night when she heard that a SWAT team was arriving at the complex. She said law enforcement officials announced over a megaphone that they had a search warrant for the apartment number where Mr. Polito lived.

The officers shouted a few times, and then Mrs Pearson heard a bang.

The apartment complex is about a 20-minute drive from UNLV’s campus, where police cruisers littered the grounds Thursday.

David Lenzin, 25, a computer engineering student from Calgary, Alberta, had returned to collect supplies from a design competition held by the engineering department on Wednesday. He and other students had dressed up and gone to campus early to show off designs they had been working on for a year; Mr. Lenzin’s was a prototype of a robot that would clean surfaces.

“It’s creepy to be on campus,” he said. “It’s empty. There are cops everywhere. When you walk past people on campus, all you see are dejected faces.”

For many students on campus — nearly 90 percent of whom are Nevadans — the shooting recalled the horrors of the 2017 attack at a country music concert just a few miles away. The shooting, the deadliest in modern American history, killed 60 people and injured hundreds.

UNLV President Keith E. Whitfield said Thursday that Professor Navarro Velez joined the university about five years ago. She previously worked at PwC, the accounting firm, in Puerto Rico, and went on to study at the University of Puerto Rico. She had her Ph.D. in accounting from the University of Central Florida, according to her biography on the UNLV website.

Professor Chang taught at the school for over twenty years after receiving his doctorate. from the University of Pittsburgh in 2001, his resume shows. He had completed his undergraduate studies in oceanography at National Taiwan Ocean University.

Mr. Whitfield, the president, said in a statement that Wednesday’s shooting had in many ways been “the realization of our greatest fears.”

At a press conference, he opposed the idea of ​​closing off the campus to the city around it.

“My intention is not to close the campus, but to see if we can do other things,” he said, adding that he supported the idea of ​​adding more security cameras.

Kitty Bennett research contributed. Glenn Thrush reporting contributed.