LAS VEGAS (TNS) — The gunman suspected of killing three people at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was identified as an academic who was seeking work at the university, according to law enforcement sources familiar with the investigation.
Anthony Polito, 67, is believed to have targeted at least some of his victims, said one of the sources, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation.
Two of those killed were identified as Lee Business School faculty members Patricia Navarro-Velez and Cha Jan “Jerry” Chang, UNLV officials said Thursday. The third victim, also a UNLV faculty member, has not been identified pending notification of next of kin.
The condition of a fourth gunshot victim, who was critically injured, had stabilized by Wednesday night, authorities said.
Within minutes of the shooting, which began around noon Wednesday at UNLV’s business school, law enforcement officers opened fire on the gunman, authorities said at a Wednesday evening news conference. The gunman was killed outside the building, Las Vegas Metropolitan Sheriff Kevin McMahill said.
UNLV students Lindsey Jones, 20, left, and Jade Phillips, 19, were working at a cafe on campus and hunkered down there when the shooting was reported.
Nearby, investigators searched Polito’s apartment in Henderson with the aid of a SWAT team.
Neighbors said the man, always in business clothes and often carrying a briefcase, had stood out from the younger residents in the apartment complex, about eight miles from UNLV’s campus. His attire — along with his black license plate that read ‘KAPEESH’ — had led some of the neighbors to refer to him as “mafia dude.” He didn’t like small talk.
On his personal website, Polito wrote at length about his life, his fascination with Las Vegas and rambling conspiracy theories, rarely failing to mention membership in the Mensa society for people with high IQ.
Despite no expertise in the field, he claimed in a 2014 self-published essay that he was the first to solve the Zodiac killer’s cryptography. In another essay about the Malaysia Airlines flight that went missing with 239 people aboard in 2014, he wrote baselessly that “government/media disinformation was dispersed to suppress public realization that MH370 had been hijacked” in order “to suppress the actual location of the wreckage.”
In a section of the website titled “Powerful Organzations Bent on Global Domination!” he linked to a number of conspiracy theories, including a film by Alex Jones about the “globalists’ dark agenda.”