The man police said killed three faculty members Wednesday at UNLV was a career professor, most recently a part-time instructor at Roseman University of Health Sciences in Henderson, with an interest in dark conspiracies and mysteries and a belief that “there is political turf-fighting, ignoble actions, pettiness, insularity” at universities.
Sheriff Kevin McMahill identified the suspect Thursday as Anthony James Polito, 67, and said he was killed in a shootout with UNLV police after shooting four people, three of them fatally, in a classroom-and-office building.
Polito labeled himself as a semi-retired university professor on his now-deleted Linked-In profile, which displayed an “in remembrance” badge saying the account had been “memorialized as a tribute to Tony Polito’s professional legacy.” It was unclear when the “in memory of” badge had been added or by whom, or when or why the page was taken down.
His personal website, which includes his background in academia, named Roseman in his “biosketch” as one of the schools where he had taught. He also said he taught at East Carolina University, the University of Northern Iowa, Brenau University in Georgia, and the University of Georgia. Most of his experience was at East Carolina University.
A Roseman spokesman confirmed that Polito had been a contracted adjunct faculty member from October 2018 to June 2022 in the university’s master of business administration program, and he taught a “health care operations management” course in 2020. Roseman is a small private university with campuses in Nevada and Utah that specializes in training providers in nursing, pharmacy, dentistry and medicine. It had offered an MBA degree, but the program was discontinued in 2022. His contract was terminated in 2022 when the program was discontinued, the spokesman said.
A spokeswoman for East Carolina University in Greenville, N.C., confirmed that Polito had been in the department of marketing and supply chain management from 2001 to 2017. He resigned at the rank of associate professor, with tenure.
‘Not for those short in moral character’
Polito’s personal website, which is still online, listed courses he previously taught and linked to his resume. He instructed 181 sections in business education and 5,863 students at three large public universities, according to his online resume.
In one website post about his “instructional philosophy,” he wrote that “the halls of our academies are hardly perfect.”
“There is political turf-fighting, ignoble actions, pettiness, insularity. Sometimes intellectual ideas are borrowed, even though we would decry that behavior in students. Though the halls are not perfect, academics must strive to make them so as best they can,” he said. “That is because one of the greatest responsibilities we hold is that we should strive to model to students the highest citizenry possible. This so that students can see & understand it, this so students can appreciate the value of it, this so students can aspire to practice it as best they can, throughout the balance of their lives. These halls are best reserved, not for those short in moral character, but for those who intend to mold it.”
He also had long, sometimes rambling pages on his interests and hobbies, including cars, computers and “theories regarding various mysteries and puzzles.”
There, he posted a piece called “What Really Happened To Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370,” which vanished over the Indian Ocean in 2014, and a 15-page paper saying he had uncovered the identity of the Zodiac serial killer, who has gone unidentified for decades.
Zodiac, so called because of taunting letters he sent to newspapers with coded messages, has been blamed for at least five killings in Northern California in the late 1960s.
“Just so you won’t initially write off my solution as that of a total crackpot, let me first say that I have been a member of MENSA for 35 years, I hold a double undergraduate degree in Mathematics & Statistics (two skills closely associated with successful cryptographers) … and I hold a masters degree and a doctoral degree from top-tier universities as well. So I am not a dumb guy!”
Mensa International is the high-IQ society open to people who score in the 98th percentile or higher on a standardized IQ test.
Eviction notice taped to door
The gunman opened fire about 11:45 a.m. Wednesday in Beam Hall, home to the Lee Business School.
Adam Garcia, University Police Chief-Southern Command, said at Thursday’s news conference that the first officer on scene, from the UNLV force, got there within 78 seconds of the first 911 call reporting the shooting.
“The collective response and the actions of our initially responding officers no doubt saved lives,” he said.
Metro Police Wednesday night searched Polito’s apartment on Arroyo Grande Boulevard in Henderson. McMahill said inside there was a chair with an arrow pointing down to a document similar to a last will and testament. Officers also found computers and components, and ammunition and a box for a handgun like the one used in the shootings, a Taurus 9mm that was purchased legally in 2022.
The sheriff said Polito was struggling financially, “as evidenced by when we served the search warrant on his apartment, there was a notice of eviction taped to the front door.” He said authorities believe Polito acted alone and gave no red flags before the shootings.
Officials haven’t explicitly released a motive for the shooting, although McMahill said he had unsuccessfully applied many times for positions at several Nevada colleges.
Las Vegas Mayor Carolyn Goodman said Wednesday that “we have to teach our children to handle stress and be able to work through anger and hate in other ways.”
“It is people filled with anger or not understanding how to handle disappointment in their lives that they become even more hateful and full of anger and take lives of others,” she added.
Clark County identified two of the three deceased victims Thursday as accounting professor Patricia Navarro Velez, 39, of Las Vegas, and business professor Cha Jan “Jerry” Chang, 64, of Henderson.
The third deceased victim was described as a faculty member, but their identity was withheld pending notification of their family. The surviving victim was described as a 38-year-old man who is a visiting professor. McMahill said he walked down from the fifth floor and was taken to Sunrise Hospital with life-threatening injuries. The sheriff said the survivor’s condition had worsened since he was listed in stable condition Wednesday.
McMahill said Polito had a criminal record of computer trespass, which is similar to hacking, out of Virginia dating to 1992.
While it’s unclear how many shots he fired in the UNLV rampage, police found 11 handgun magazines on his body. Nine were still loaded. The sheriff said Polito may have intended to continue his rampage in the crowded UNLV Student Union, next to Beam Hall.
A dash camera in Politio’s car, which was recovered on campus, allowed police to see his movements prior to the shootings. McMahill said that before coming to UNLV, Polito stopped by a Henderson post office to mail 22 letters to “various university personnel across the country with no return address.” He said he didn’t know the contents of the letters, which have been intercepted, but said the first one opened had an unidentified white powder inside. Polito also left behind a list of people at UNLV and East Carolina University, although none were the ones he shot, McMahill said.
While it was implied that Polito held grudges against peers, he seemed to be liked by students at East Carolina, according to reviews on his now-deleted page on the website Rate My Professor. Several former students said his teaching style was unconventional and he told stories from his life instead of giving traditional academic lectures. One said ,“The school is constantly trying to get him fired for no reason except his teaching practices are different.”
The page had been dormant since late 2016, although it had a surge of activity in the hours after the shooting with comments excoriating him.
“Glad he is dead tbh,” one said.
Another: “How can we ever forgive you?”