LAS VEGAS (KLAS) — The gunman in the shooting at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, that left three people dead and one seriously injured, was a former professor who had applied for jobs several times at Nevada universities, but was turned down every time, the Clark County Sheriff’s Office said Thursday.
The gunman, identified as Anthony Polito, was killed in a shootout with two detectives, police said Wednesday. The shooter did not appear to be targeting students, law enforcement officials said. All four people killed were faculty members.
The 67-year-old man lived in a Henderson, Nevada, apartment, which police searched following the shooting. Sheriff Kevin McMahill said Polito had been struggling financially, and law enforcement found an eviction notice taped to his door when they arrived. Inside, they also found a chair with an arrow pointing down to a document, which appears to be Polito’s last will and testament.
Police also reviewed dash camera they found in Polito’s car, which showed him going to a post office before the shooting on Wednesday. He mailed 22 letters to various university personnel around the country, McMahill said. Every letter was sent without a return address.
During a screening of some of the intercepted envelopes, police discovered the first letter opened had an “unknown white powder substance” in it.
As law enforcement works with USPS to track down and recover all those letters, McMahill advised any educators around the country who receive a letter that is taped shut and does not have a return address to proceed with caution and contact local law enforcement.
McMahill said investigators are still working to pin down a motive, but the gunman did not appear to be targeting students. McMahill said he entered campus with a list of people he was seeking.
The list of targets included UNLV staff, as well as staff at other universities, but none of the people on the list ended up as victims, McMahill said.
Polito was a professor in North Carolina at East Carolina University from 2001 to 2017, according to a statement released Thursday by the school. He resigned in January 2017 as a tenured associate professor.
One of Polito’s former students at East Carolina University, Paul Whittington, said Polito went on tangents during class about his many trips to Las Vegas. Polito told his students he visited twice yearly, staying in different hotels and going to various clubs, Whittington said.
“He was really really, really fixated on the city of Las Vegas,” Whittington said. “I think he just really liked going there.”
Polito 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.”
According to Roseman University of Health Sciences in Henderson, Polito also worked there as a contracted employee for the Master of Business Administration program from October 2018 to June 2022.
“During this period, he taught only two courses, Healthcare Operations Management, in July 2020 via Zoom and in October 2020 in-person. His contract was terminated on June 30, 2022, following the University’s discontinuation of the MBA program,” said Jason Roth, vice president of communications and partnerships.
On LinkedIn, Polito wrote, “The greatest gifts and takeaways I possess from my many years within higher education are the many kind & positive comments students made regarding my instruction and disposition toward them.”
Polito also had a personal website where he posted some of his writing, including pieces titled “What Really Happened to Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370” and “Final Eighteen Letters of the Zodiac Killer’s 408 Cipher Solved … and his Identity Revealed.”
In one 15-page thesis, Polito takes credit for decoding 18 characters, which he claimed identified the Zodiac Killer, the famous serial killer in California who used a code of symbols to communicate with police in the 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,” he wrote in his introduction. He also said he was so interested in cryptography that he applied for the CIA, NSA, and the DIA, but was turned down.
The gunman opened fire at about 11:45 a.m. Wednesday on the fourth floor of the building that houses UNLV’s Lee Business School and then went to several other floors before he was killed in a shootout with two university police detectives outside the building, UNLV Police Chief Adam Garcia said.
McMahill said the suspect’s weapon, a .9mm handgun, was purchased legally last year. The sheriff said they were still investigating how many rounds the suspect fired in his rampage.
Authorities gave the all-clear about 40 minutes after the first report of an active shooter.
President Keith E. Whitfield said in a letter to students and staff that the Wednesday shooting in the building housing UNLV’s business school “was the most difficult day in the history of our university.”
He identified two of the victims who were killed as business school professors Patricia Navarro-Velez and Cha Jan “Jerry” Chang. Whitfield said the name of the third victim will be released after relatives have been notified of the death.
The wounded man, a 38-year-old visiting professor, was downgraded to life-threatening condition Thursday, police said at a news conference.
The Associated Press and Nexstar’s Addy Bink contributed to this report.
