HUNTSVILLE, Ala. – Students banded together to let administrators know something wasn’t quite right about Professor Amy Bishop. She taught by reading straight out of the textbook, never made eye contact and liked to remind people constantly that she went to Harvard.
“We could tell something was off, that she was not like other teachers,” said nursing student Caitlin Phillips, who was among those who complained to administrators at least three times a year ago that the biology professor was unsettling and ineffective in the classroom. Some students also signed a petition against Bishop.
Students said they had no reason to think Bishop might turn violent. But after Bishop’s arrest last Friday on charges of shooting to death three colleagues during a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the complaints add to the picture that has emerged of Bishop as a brilliant but erratic figure.
While police have not released a motive for the shootings, colleagues said the 44-year-old neuroscientist was simmering with resentment over being denied tenure last March.
Her court-appointed lawyer, Roy W. Miller, declined to comment about Bishop’s defense. “It is just so premature,” he said. “I just got involved.”
Since the shooting, other disturbing behavior from Bishop has come to light.
In 1986, she killed her 18-year-old brother with a shotgun blast in Braintree, Mass., then demanded a getaway car at gunpoint from an auto dealer, authorities said. She claimed the gun went off accidentally, and she was never charged.
