University of Alabama in Huntsville shooting Inventions Information

Coordinates: 34°43′38″N 86°38′23″W / 34.727175°N 86.639818°W / 34.727175; -86.639818

Three people were killed and three others wounded in a shooting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in Huntsville, Alabama, on February 12, 2010. During the course of a routine meeting of the biology department attended by approximately 12 people, professor Amy Bishop stood up and began shooting those closest to her with a 9mm Ruger handgun.

A biology professor at the university, Bishop was charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder. On September 11, 2012, Bishop pled guilty to the above charges after family members of victims petitioned the judge against use of the death penalty. The jury heard a condensed version of the evidence on September 24, 2012, as required by Alabama law. On September 24, 2012, Amy Bishop was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

In March 2009, Bishop had been denied tenure at the university, making spring 2010 her last semester there, per university policy. Due to the attention Bishop attracted as a result of the shooting, previous violent incidents in which she had been involved or implicated were reevaluated. In 1986, she shot and killed her brother in Braintree, Massachusetts, in an incident officially ruled an accident. She was also questioned, along with her husband, after a 1993 pipe-bomb incident directed toward her lab supervisor.

The day of the shooting, Bishop taught her anatomy and neurosciences class. A student in Bishop's class claimed she "seemed perfectly normal" during the lecture.

She attended a biology department faculty meeting in Room 369 on the third floor of the Shelby Center for Science and Technology, which houses the UAH Biology and Mathematics departments. According to witnesses, 12 or 13 people attended the meeting, which was described as "an ordinary faculty meeting." Bishop's behavior was also described as "normal" just prior to the shooting.

She sat quietly at the meeting for 30 or 40 minutes, before pulling out a Ruger P95 9mm handgun "just before" 4:00 p.m. CST, according to a faculty member. Joseph Ng, an associate professor who witnessed the attack, said: "[She] got up suddenly, took out a gun and started shooting at each one of us. She started with the one closest to her, and went down the row shooting her targets in the head." According to another survivor, Debra Moriarity, dean of the university's graduate program and a professor of biochemistry, "This wasn't random shooting around the room; this was execution style." Those who were shot were on one side of the oval table used during the meeting, and the five on the other side, including Ng, dropped to the floor.

After Bishop had fired several rounds, Moriarity said that Bishop pointed the gun at her and pulled the trigger, but heard only a "click", as her gun "either jammed or ran out of ammunition." She described Bishop as initially appearing "angry", and then following the apparent weapon malfunction, "perplexed". Ng said Moriarity attempted to stop Bishop by approaching her and asking her to stop, and helped the other survivors push Bishop from the room and block the door. Ng said "Moriarity was probably the one that saved our lives. She was the one that initiated the rush."

The suspected murder weapon, a 9-mm Ruger P95 handgun, was found in a bathroom on the second floor of the building. Bishop did not have a permit to carry a concealed weapon. She was arrested a few minutes later outside the building. Shortly after her arrest, Bishop was quoted as saying, "It didn't happen. There's no way." When asked about the deaths of her colleagues, Bishop replied, "There's no way. They're still alive."

Police interviewed Bishop's husband, James Anderson, after it was determined that she had called him to pick her up after the shooting; they did not charge him with a crime. In addition, a neighbor revealed, in later interviews, that he saw the couple leaving their home with duffle bags on Friday afternoon, (revealed to be martial arts bags) prior to the shooting. Anderson revealed that his wife had borrowed the gun used in the shooting, and that he had escorted her to an indoor shooting range in the weeks prior to the incident.

Shortly after Bishop's arrest, people at the university's biology department expressed concern to police that she had "booby trapped the science building with a 'herpes bomb'" intended to spread the virus. She had previously worked with the herpes virus while completing her post-doctoral studies. She wrote a novel describing the spread of a virus similar to herpes throughout the world "causing pregnant women to miscarry." The police had already searched the premises, finding only the handgun used in the shooting.

Three faculty members were killed, and three others were injured. Only a few students were present in the building at the time of the shooting, and none were harmed. A memorial service was held at UAH on Friday, February 19, 2010, with 3,000 people in attendance.

Amy Bishop (born April 24, 1965; age 44 at the time of the shooting) is married to James Anderson and is the mother of four children. She grew up in Massachusetts, attended Braintree High School, and completed her undergraduate degree at Northeastern University in Boston. Her father Samuel Bishop was a professor there in the Art Department. She earned her Ph.D. in genetics from Harvard University.

Bishop's 1993 dissertation at Harvard was titled The role of methoxatin (PQQ) in the respiratory burst of phagocytes, and was 137 pages in length. Her research interests include 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 stated that Bishop's work was of poor quality and undeserving of a doctorate degree, calling it "local scandal No. 1".

Bishop joined the faculty of the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Alabama in Huntsville as an assistant professor in 2003; she was teaching five courses prior to the shooting. Previously, she was an instructor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. Bishop and her husband competed in a technology competition and developed a "portable cell incubator", coming in third and winning $25,000. Prodigy Biosystems, where Anderson is employed, raised $1.25 million to develop the automated cell incubator. The university's president stated that the incubator would "change the way biological and medical research is conducted", but some scientists consulted by the press declared it unnecessary and too expensive.

According to a friend and fellow member of a writing group in Massachusetts, Bishop had written three unpublished novels. One featured a woman scientist working to defeat a potential pandemic virus, and struggling with suicidal thoughts at the threat of not earning tenure. The novels reportedly "reveal a deep preoccupation with the concept of deliverance from sin". Bishop is the second cousin of the novelist John Irving. She 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." She had a literary agent although she had not published any books. 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." Another member described Bishop as smart but abrasive in her interactions with the other members and as feeling "entitled to praise."

Several colleagues of Bishop had expressed concern over her behavior. She was described as interrupting meetings with "bizarre tangents ... left field kind of stuff," being "strange", and, notably, "crazy". One of these colleagues was a member of Bishop's tenure-review committee. After Bishop's tenure was denied and she learned that this colleague referred to her as "crazy," she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), alleging sex discrimination. She cited the professor's remark to be used as possible evidence in that case. The professor did not retract his comments:

Bishop was reportedly a poor instructor and unpopular among her students. She dismissed several graduate students from her lab, and others sought transfers out. In 2009, several 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." A petition signed by "dozens of students" was sent to the department head. The complaints, however, did not result in any classroom changes. Also in 2009, Bishop published an article in a vanity-press medical journal listing her husband and three minor children as co-authors. The article was later removed from the journal website.

Bishop was suspended without pay retroactively on the day of the attack. In a one-paragraph letter dated February 26, 2010, she was fired. Bishop received a letter of termination from Jack Fix, Dean of the College of Sciences, which did not state a reason for her dismissal. Her termination was effective February 12, the day of the shooting.

As explained by University president Williams, after Bishop was denied tenure in March 2009, she did not expect to have her teaching contract renewed after March 2010. She appealed the decision to the University's administration. Without reviewing the content of the tenure application, they determined that the process was carried out according to policy and denied the appeal. The routine faculty meeting at which Bishop opened fire was unrelated to her tenure.

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