LAS VEGAS — On Wednesday a gunman walked into a University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) building and killed three faculty members.
Clark County, Nevada posted to X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, sharing the names of two of the victims.
13 ON YOUR SIDE confirmed with Central Michigan University (CMU) that one of the victims, 64-year-old Professor Cha Jan Chang, received his Master of Science in computer science from CMU in May of 1986.
According to the post on X, Chang, who went by Jerry, was described by UNLV's President Keith Whitfield as a longtime educator of management information systems, spending "more than 20 years of his academic career teaching a generation of UNLV Business School students."
The other identified victim was said to be 39-year-old Patricia Navarro Velez of Las Vegas. She was an assistant professor at UNLV.
The post to X explained that while the third victim has been identified, their identity is being withheld while police try to contact their family.
Police still have no motive for the Wednesday attack, but said the shooter, 67-year-old Anthony Polito, had been denied jobs at various Nevada colleges and universities.
Polito was killed in a shootout with police. On him they found nine magazines for a 9 mm handgun he had legally purchased last year as well as a list of targets at the school. Police said that none of the people on that list were shot during the attack.
Polito arrived at UNLV at 11:28 a.m., about 15 minutes before the shooting, in a 2007 Lexus that he parked in a lot south of the business school, Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill said.
Polito got out of the car, placed items in his waistband and then entered Beam Hall, a business school building, at 11:33 a.m. The first reports of gunfire came at 11:45 a.m., McMahill said.
Terrified students and professors cowered in classrooms and offices as the gunman roamed the top three floors of UNLV’s five-story Lee Business School.
University and city police swarmed the building. UNLV police Chief Adam Garcia has said the first university officer arrived at the business school within 78 seconds of the gunfire report.
Near the main entrance, UNLV officers saw Polito leaving the building and he shot at them, a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department statement said Thursday night. The officers fired back, killing him at the scene about 10 minutes after the first reports of shots fired.
Student Jordan Eckermann, who was in a second-floor classroom in the business school when the rampage began, said the timestamp on a short cellphone video he recorded showed the building’s alarm went off at 11:48 a.m., three minutes after the shooting started.
It’s unclear how many shots Polito fired, but the sheriff said Polito brought more than 150 rounds of ammunition to the campus.
Given that sheer number of rounds, McMahill said he believed Polito may have been intending to open fire on the student union next to the business school, where students were hanging out, eating and playing games.
Polito also was carrying what McMahill described as a “target list” of named faculty members both from UNLV and from East Carolina University in North Carolina, where Polito taught at the business school from 2001 to 2017.
He resigned from East Carolina as a tenured associate professor, according to a statement Thursday from the university.
“None of the individuals on the target list became a victim,” McMahill said, adding that police have contacted everyone on the list, except for one person who was on a flight.
A dash camera in Polito’s car showed that before heading to campus, he stopped at a post office in Henderson, where he was living, police said.
Police discovered that he had dropped off 22 letters to university faculty members across the U.S., some of which contained an unknown white powder that was later found to be harmless.
Police didn’t immediately disclose the nature of the letters or other details.
The sheriff said at a news conference that investigators were still looking into a motive but noted that Polito applied for several jobs at various colleges and universities in Nevada and was denied the job each time.
However, Roseman University of Health Sciences in Henderson said Polito had an adjunct faculty contract and taught two courses in the school’s the Master of Business Administration program from October 2018 to June 2022. He left when the program was discontinued, said Jason Roth, a spokesperson for the school.
Authorities on Thursday said Polito appeared to be struggling financially. When they arrived at his apartment Wednesday night to search the property, they found an eviction notice taped to his front door, McMahill said.
Inside, detectives found a chair with an arrow pointing down to a document “similar to a last will and testament,” McMahill said without elaborating.
The university was to remain closed Friday but was tentatively scheduled to reopen next week for finals.
The attack at UNLV terrified a city that experienced the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history in October 2017, when a gunman killed 60 people and wounded more than 400 after opening fire from the window of a high-rise suite at Mandalay Bay on the Las Vegas Strip, just miles from the UNLV campus.
It wasn’t immediately clear how long Polito had been living in the Las Vegas area.
One of Polito’s former students at East Carolina, Paul Whittington, said Polito often talked about his regular trips to Las Vegas. He also seemed obsessive over anonymous student reviews at the end of each semester, Whittington said.
Polito told Whittington’s class that he remembered the faces of students who gave him bad reviews and would express that he was sure who they were and where they sat, pointing at seats in the classroom, Whittington said.
“He always talked about the negative feedback he got,” said Whittington, now 33, who took Polito’s intro to operations management class in 2014. “He didn’t get a lot of it, but there would always be one student every semester, or at least one student every class, that would give a negative review. And he fixated on those.”
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Finley reported from Norfolk, Virginia. Associated Press reporters Michael Balsamo in Washington, Ken Ritter in Las Vegas, Terry Tang in Phoenix and Robert Jablon in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
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