UNLV shooting suspect rejected for job, police say
Retired Las Vegas Police Lt. Randy Sutton joins LiveNOW’s Andrew Craft for more on who the UNLV shooting suspect was.
“Someone’s shooting. Please hurry,” said one woman caller, her voice cracking with fear as she described the shots as sounding like they were next door. “I really want to go home.”
The gunman, 67-year-old Anthony Polito, walked into UNLV’s business school around lunchtime Wednesday and fired shots as he roamed the top three floors, where faculty offices are located, police said. Along with the three people who were killed, a 38-year-old visiting professor was wounded and hospitalized with life-threatening injuries.
University President Keith Whitfield said Friday that after this week’s shooting, students and faculty will not return to campus this year and final exams next week have been canceled.
3 killed after gunman opens fire on UNLV campus
Police in Las Vegas provided an update after responding to an active shooter on the campus of University Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). The LVMPD Sheriff said three people were killed in the shooting. The suspect is also deceased.
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.
“In a word, these two officers are heroes. They kept the worst from becoming a bloodbath,” the chief said.
“A lot of shots and then screaming,” he said, describing what he was hearing. He estimated about six shots.
UNLV shooter was a professor seeking job
Former NYPD detective Michael Alcazar explains the response when it comes to an active shooter situation.
“She just called me and she can’t even breathe. Can you call her back or something? Can you investigate,” the woman pleaded.
Police still had no motive for Wednesday’s attack but said the shooter, who was a career college professor, had been denied a job at various Nevada colleges and universities and appeared to be struggling financially.
The first university officer arrived within 78 seconds of the gunfire report, and university and city police swarmed the building. A shootout erupted near the main entrance when Drum and Garcia saw Polito leaving the building. The officers killed the gunman about 10 minutes after the shooting rampage began.
It’s unclear how many shots Polito fired, but the sheriff said Polito brought more than 150 rounds of ammunition with him.
Polito also was carrying what McMahill described as a “target list” of faculty members both from UNLV and from East Carolina University in North Carolina, where Polito taught at the business school from 2001 to 2017.
Polito’s employment record at East Carolina did not include any disciplinary actions or red flags, according to a law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation. The official was not authorized to release the information publicly and spoke to The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity.
Roseman University of Health Sciences in Henderson, Nevada, said Polito had an adjunct faculty contract and taught two courses in the school’s Master of Business Administration program from October 2018 to June 2022. He left when the program was discontinued, said Jason Roth, a school spokesperson.
“He always talked about the negative feedback he got,” said Whittington, now 33, who took an introductory course in operations management with Polito 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.”
