Last year, several teachers were shot and some killed during a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Recently, their relatives have filed a lawsuit against not only the alleged killer and her husband but UAH administrators as well. The families of Dr. Maria Ragland Davis and Dr. Adriel Johnson, both of whom died in the shooting, claim that officials knew that the professor charged with the killings, Amy Bishop, was unstable and yet took no steps to prevent the murders.
The families' lawyer, Douglas Fierberg of Bode & Grenier in Washington, D.C, claims that the university's provost, Dr. Vistap M. Karbhari, was responsible for protecting the staff from what happened. He says they have learned from departmental e-mails that Bishop's "mental instability was known by administrators, some of whom she had threatened, harassed and hounded following denial of tenure." He goes on to say "The University of Alabama Hunstiville Provost has clear obligations under UAH regulations, and standards adopted by universities nationwide following previous high-profile massacres, to obtain intervention by university police and counseling services in order to protect staff and students before Dr. Bishop was allowed into a staff meeting where she gunned down her colleagues."
People often act rashly when they are upset and say things they may or may not mean, so it is hard to determine whether to take something like an angry e-mail as a predictor of an impending shooting. Many threats or angry words are idle and only on very rare occasion lead to something as serious as these events.
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| Amy Bishop looking fairly normal before all this mess |
The idea that a neurobiologist with a Harvard attained Ph.D, four children, and early-stage funding for a start-up company (not an easy thing to get) still boggles the mind of us observers who know it's true, so why should anyone have suspected this same, seemingly stable person to suddenly go berserk like she did? There was little reason to believe that Bishop was crazy merely from this act of sending e-mails, despite allegations that knowledge of the fact she murdered her brother when she was a minor should have signaled this. What many people are failing to mention is that only following this shooting was her brother's case reopened, the body exhumed, and the conclusion made that her shooting her brother with a shotgun was not just an unfortunate gun accident.
People who knew her described her as full of herself. We have all known someone who is annoying, weird, or abrasive. However, officials cannot take action against someone simply because he or she is disliked or makes people uncomfortable. While it may be true that extra steps could have been taken and the whole thing avoided, whether through a more thorough investigation at the time of her brother's death or the actions of Khavari, hindsight is 20/20. Any number of tragic events could have been prevented by the intervening of someone close to the action, from a bad blind date to a roadside bombing in Afghanistan.
There are just times when people slip through the cracks only to go on to do even more heinous things, people that slip through the cracks simply because they are never caught doing anything bad. Looking back, one can say, "Wow, that guy was weird; it sure was more than a little disturbing how he went out and tried deliberately to hit animals with his car and laughed about it later." However, was that enough to lock that person away before they became the next Unabomber? Was what appeared to be a gun accident and some angry e-mails enough to fire and ban Bishop from the UAH campus and lock her in a mental institution? No. Blaming people to the point of a lawsuit simply because of one's own ability to actively reflect on what may or may not have been if someone somewhere had done something differently is pointless and asinine. It's just the actions of a money-grubbing lawyer suckling on the teat of a family's grief, suing as many people as possible for the maximum return.
Think, people,
Miss K
I largely agree with you; I don't think that the family should be seeking money from the provost, and the only reason they probably decided to is because their lawyer talked them into naming him in the suit. However, I think that if there are clear rules and regulations in place at UAH for how to react to threats, the provost (and any other faculty or staff member who received such threats) should definitely be held responsible for not upholding the rules and regulations of the campus, which may have played a rather large role in allowing the later shooting.
We don't fail to close down campuses when we receive anonymous bomb threats, and, in my opinion, neither should we fail to act when someone is distressed or upset enough that they would actually make such threats in the first place. The average person is not going to make serious threats like that unless they are so upset that they are temporarily not in their right mind, and if they are already in that state, they may very well pose some amount of danger to themselves and others.
I think that UAH's rules and regulations regarding such threats are perfectly valid. I'm pretty sure threatening someone is illegal anyway.
I don't think that the families should seek money or anything like that from the provost, but if UAH is not holding him responsible for failing to uphold the rules and regulations which it is his very job to uphold--and which all faculty members probably have to sign off on before being employed--then I think they should definitely do whatever they can to draw attention to this fact, even if what they could do was to file a lawsuit (in which they seek no monetary compensation, of course). It would not have been personal at all on the provost's part to follow the rules laid down for him, and if he failed to follow those rules even in a case as serious as a threat, what other rules has he been ignoring or just brushing off as not serious or things he should have to take the time to follow through?
Having said all that, I'm sure he feels as horrible as anyone, if not moreso, about what happened. But feeling horrible for what you did (or, in his case, failed to do) isn't always enough to earn you a get out of jail free card, in my opinion.
That was entirely too long. Maybe I should start my own blog! I do enjoy yours.
Respectfully,
Kortni