HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – A professor who survived a deadly university shooting rampage said the colleague charged in the attack methodically shot her victims in the head until the gun apparently jammed and she was pushed out of the room.
Associate professor Joseph Ng told The Associated Press on Tuesday he was one of 12 people at a biology department meeting Friday at the University of Alabama-Huntsville. He described the details in an e-mail to a colleague at the University of California-Irvine.
Ng said the meeting had been going on for about half an hour when Amy Bishop “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.”
Bishop, a Harvard-educated neurobiologist, was arrested and charged with one count of capital murder and three counts of attempted murder.
It’s not the first time Bishop has been accused in a killing. In 1986, she killed her 18-year-old brother with a shotgun at their suburban Boston home. She told police she had been trying to learn how to use the gun, which her father had bought for protection, when it accidentally discharged.
The killing was ruled an accident, but John Polio, who headed the Braintree, Mass., police department at the time, now has questions about the investigation.
Polio, 87, at first defended the handling of the case. But he said Tuesday he has “myriad” concerns about a report on it, which he saw for the first time over the weekend.
