2000 University of Arkansas shooting

On Monday, August 28, 2000, James Easton Kelly, 37, a disgruntled graduate student at the University of Arkansas, shot and killed his faculty advisor, Prof. John R. Locke, and then committed suicide shortly afterwards.

John R. Locke, son of a Danish immigrant and a New York City native, had been teaching Comparative Literature, Mythology, and Eastern philosophy at the university since 1967.

He also circulated among friends and colleagues a private unpublished manuscript of meditation guides called The Troika Technique—based on his readings and study of Buddhist and Taoist philosophy and Jungian psychology.

[4] Kelly, an African-American Arkansas native, was the son of a minister and considered a career in the ministry himself before choosing to attend Grinnell College where he earned a BA in English in 1984.

However, Kelly began enrolling in courses, but failing to attend them, and eventually Locke grew disappointed with the student's increasingly unpredictable behavior.

[4] The evening of the tragedy, approximately 500 people poured into the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Fayetteville on campus for an unofficial prayer vigil organized by English PhD student (one of Locke's advisees), and her partner.

[6] A year later, on August 27, 2001, Locke's colleagues and friends began collections to create a memorial garden outside Kimpel Hall in his honor.

[8][9] In 2006, Dr. Virginia Krauft, a Jungian psychologist and friend, opened the John Locke Memorial Library to house Locke's large collection of books on German, American, British, French, Russian, Irish, Italian, Asian, Japanese and Scandinavian literature and literary criticism along with studies in the sciences, visual arts and anthropology and several books on Eastern philosophy and religion.