2010 University of Alabama in Huntsville shooting
[7] Bishop sat quietly at the meeting for 30 to 40 minutes before pulling out a Ruger P95 9mm handgun just before 4:00 p.m.[4] A witness said that she "got up suddenly, took out a gun and started shooting at each one of us.
[12] Shortly after Bishop's arrest, there was concern that she had "booby trapped the science building with a 'herpes bomb'" intended to spread the virus.
[13] Amy Bishop (born April 24, 1965; age 44 at the time of the shooting)[19] is married to Jimmy "James" Anderson and is the mother of four children.
[20][21] She grew up in Massachusetts, attended Braintree High School,[22] and completed her undergraduate degree at Northeastern University in Boston, where her father, Samuel Bishop, was a professor in the art department.
[24] Her research interests included induction of adaptive resistance to nitric oxide in the central nervous system and utilization of motor neurons for the development of neural circuits grown on biological computer chips.
An anonymous source at Harvard said that Bishop's work was of poor quality and undeserving of a doctoral degree, calling it "local scandal No.
[2] UAH president David Williams considered that the incubator would "change the way biological and medical research is conducted",[25] but some scientists consulted by the press declared it unnecessary and too expensive.
One featured a woman scientist working to defeat a pandemic virus, and struggling with suicidal thoughts at the prospect of not earning tenure.
[25] Bishop was a member of the Hamilton Writer's Group while living in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in the late 1990s and was said to believe that writing would be "her ticket out of academia".
[31] Members of the club said she "would frequently cite her Harvard degree and family ties to Irving to boost her credential as a serious writer".
After her tenure was denied and she learned that this colleague had called her "crazy",[full citation needed] Bishop filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), alleging sex discrimination, citing the professor's remark as possible evidence.
[25] In 2009, several UAH students said they complained to administrators about Bishop on at least three occasions, saying she was "ineffective in the classroom and had odd, unsettling ways".
[42] Police found a live round in the gun's chamber, meaning that Bishop must have racked its slide after shooting her brother.
[9] He and others said that then-chief John Polio had ordered Bishop released to her mother Judy,[45][25] who was allegedly a political supporter of the chief as a member of the Braintree town council.
[39] Frazier's 2010 account and the 1987 Massachusetts State Police report differ in several key details, including whether Bishop had been arguing with her brother or with her father before the shooting.
[48] On February 25, 2010, Keating sent District Court Judge Mark Coven a letter to start a judicial inquest into the 1986 shooting.
Keating did not identify the specific news article, but The Boston Globe wrote that an Internet search revealed that "two weeks earlier, the parents of Patrick Duffy, the actor who played Bobby Ewing on the popular television show Dallas, were killed in Montana by an assailant wielding a 12-gauge shotgun, who then held up a car dealership, stole a pickup truck, and fled".
[49] On March 1, 2010, Detective Brian Howe, the state police's lead investigator in the 1986 shooting, said he looked forward to addressing the judicial inquest and stood by his 1987 report.
Patrick Radden Keefe speculated, after reviewing the evidence, that Bishop had meant to frighten or shoot her father with the shotgun after an argument and mistook her brother for him.
"I came to believe that there had indeed been a coverup" between Bishop's parents and Polio, he wrote, "but that it had been an act not of conspiracy but of compassion ... a parochial gesture of mercy and denial that had an incalculable cost, decades later, in Alabama.
"[25] In 1993, Bishop and her husband were suspected of sending two letter-bombs,[20][54] which failed to explode, to Paul Rosenberg, a Harvard Medical School professor.
[54][55] Bishop was afterward said to be "on the verge of a nervous breakdown",[55] and her husband reportedly said that he wanted to "shoot", "stab", or "strangle" Rosenberg.
Bishop pleaded guilty to assault and received probation;[59][60] prosecutors recommended that she attend anger management classes,[59] but her husband said she never went.
He said, "She seems to be doing OK."[37] On March 12, while executing a search warrant on Bishop's residence, the police discovered a "suspicious device" prompting an evacuation of the nearby neighborhood; it was later identified by the bomb squad as non-explosive.
Initially, he said Bishop had severe mental health issues that appear to be paranoid schizophrenia,[61] but later retracted that statement, saying "he had spoken out of turn".
"[67] On June 18, two days after Bishop was indicted for the murder of her brother in a reopened case, she attempted suicide in Huntsville jail.
In January 2011, attorneys representing Davis's and Johnson's families filed wrongful death lawsuits against Bishop, Anderson, and UAH.
[73] In response to this letter, Bishop's lawyers offered to change her plea to guilty in exchange for the prosecution not seeking the death penalty.
Upon receiving this offer, chief prosecutor Robert Broussard contacted and learned from the nine survivors that none of them wanted a death sentence for Bishop.
[76] On April 18, 2021, Bishop's 20-year-old son Seth Anderson, named for her late brother, was fatally shot in an unrelated incident in Huntsville.
