Three killed in Las Vegas shooting were university faculty
LAS VEGAS — The gunman suspected of killing three people at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was identified as an academic who was seeking work at the university, according to law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation.
Anthony Polito, 67, is believed to have targeted at least some of his victims, said one of the sources, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation.
Two of those killed were identified as Lee Business School faculty members Patricia Navarro-Velez and Cha Jan “Jerry” Chang, UNLV officials said Thursday. The third victim, also a UNLV faculty member, has not been identified pending notification of next of kin.
The condition of a fourth gunshot victim, who was critically injured, had stabilized by Wednesday night, authorities said.
Within minutes of the shooting, which began around noon Wednesday at UNLV’s business school, law enforcement officers opened fire on the gunman, authorities said at a Wednesday evening news conference. The gunman was killed outside the building, Las Vegas Metropolitan Sheriff Kevin McMahill said.
UNLV students Lindsey Jones, 20, left, and Jade Phillips, 19, were working at a cafe on campus and hunkered down there when the shooting was reported.
Hours later, investigators searched Polito’s apartment in Henderson with the aid of a SWAT team.
A few units in the complex were cordoned off Thursday morning as two police officers stood by. A window was broken on one of the top units, which an officer indicated had belonged to Polito.
Neighbors said the man, always in business clothes and often carrying a briefcase, had stood out from the younger residents in the apartment complex, about eight miles from UNLV’s campus. His attire — along with his black license plate that read ‘KAPEESH’ — had led some of the neighbors to refer to him as “mafia dude.” He didn’t like small talk.
“He’s very quiet, lived like a hermit,” said Anthony James Carew, 42, who moved in six years ago and said Polito was already living there. “I’ve never seen the guy have a conversation with anybody.”
Greg Gibson, who has lived in the complex for half a year, said he caught Polito’s eye the morning of the shooting and gave him a nod, getting only a “thousand-yard stare” in return.
“He seemed agitated. That’s why I noticed him,” said Gibson, 43. “He was pacing, smoking the cigarette and looked unusual, stressed out. I was like, ‘This doesn’t look good.’”
On his personal website, Polito wrote at length about his life, his fascination with Las Vegas and rambling conspiracy theories, rarely failing to mention membership in the Mensa society for people with high IQ.
Despite no expertise in the field, he claimed in a 2014 self-published essay that he was the first to solve the Zodiac killer’s cryptography. In another essay about the
Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing with 239 people aboard in 2014, he wrote baselessly that “government/ media disinformation was dispersed to suppress public realization that MH370 had been hijacked” in order “to suppress the actual location of the wreckage.”
In a section of the website titled “Powerful Organzations Bent on Global Domination!” he linked to a number of conspiracy theories, including a film by Alex Jones about the “globalists’ dark agenda” and a YouTube video promoting antisemitic tropes about the Rothschild family.
Classes at UNLV were canceled through Sunday as students, faculty and neighbors mourned the tragedy, which came six years after the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history, less than five miles from campus on the Las Vegas Strip.
“This is Route 91 all over again,” said 22-year-old student Olivia Stabile, referencing the 2017 Las Vegas shooting at a music festival in which 59 died. “Why Vegas again, out of all places, and then in one of the most defenseless places?”
Shaken students are encouraging peers to send a letter to university leaders urging them to cancel final exams that were scheduled to start next week, move them completely online or give students “a pass for bereavement considerations.”
Larissa Geilen, the social media director at UNLV’s student newspaper, the Scarlet and Gray, worried about her friends at the newsroom on the third floor of the student union.
Messages in their WhatsApp group started flowing after the campus alert of the shooting, with students trying to account for one another.
“It’s just such a gamble every single time you go out because with the prevalence of these things, it’s just bound to happen,” she said. “It’s such a horrible, horrible reality.”
As shots rang out Wednesday, students ran for safety or sheltered in place, locking doors and building barricades. Four people were taken to a hospital after suffering panic attacks.
After cowering in the dining hall for hours with the sound of helicopters whirring overhead, Amerie Collins, an 18-year-old pre-nursing student, was looking to get far away from campus Wednesday evening. She said she planned to spend the night at her cousin’s house with her roommate.
“A lot of people are not here,” said Collins said. “Everyone collectively just decided it’s not a safe place to be right now.”
Zachary Gutierrez, 18, said he’d been 15 minutes into math class when every phone chimed simultaneously with the alert to “RUN-HIDE-FIGHT.”
He spent the afternoon streaming the news of a mass shooting at his school on the class projector.
“My parents just didn’t want me staying in the dorms tonight,” Gutierrez said as he walked off campus Wednesday evening with his father.
Many students praised the response of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, which they said arrived on campus within minutes of them realizing anything was awry.