The man behind the shooting spree at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, was a former professor in North Carolina who spent much of his time in the classroom talking about his obsession with Sin City and had “peculiar” ways of working, according to former students and one of his former graduate assistants.
Anthony Polito, 67, fatally shot three people and wounded a fourth Wednesday at UNLV, where he had applied for a teaching job in 2020 but was not hired, two senior law enforcement officials briefed on the case told NBC News.
He mailed letters to nearly two dozen various university personnel throughout the country before the attack, Las Vegas police said Thursday. The letters were sent without a return address, and a white powder substance — later said to be harmless — was found in a screening of one of the envelopes. The letter’s contents, police said, were unclear.
A specific motive for the shooting is also unclear, as are details about the shooter's life leading up to the deadly shooting.
Get Boston local news, weather forecasts, lifestyle and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC Boston’s newsletters.
But during his time at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, where he taught for over a decade, he was known as a popular — if eccentric — professor. A former student recalled that he pursued her in a way that made her uncomfortable, contacting her daily and buying her gifts, while another noted his fixation on student feedback. And Polito's obsession with Las Vegas was something multiple people who knew him during that time recalled.
Read the full story at NBCNews.com here.
