UNLV Gunman Had 150 Rounds and Target List, Police Say
LAS VEGAS (NEWSnet/AP) — The gunman who was killed in a shootout Wednesday at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had loaded handgun magazines and a list of targets before walking into a campus building, police said.
Anthony Polito, age 67, was carrying the nine magazines for a 9mm handgun he’d legally purchased last year, police said Thursday.
Police still had no motive for the attack at UNLV, which killed three faculty members and left a visiting professor in life-threatening condition at a hospital.
Two of the faculty have been publicly identified: business school professors Patricia Navarro-Velez and Cha Jan “Jerry” Chang. The name of the third victim will be released after relatives have been notified of the death.
Clark County Sheriff Kevin McMahill gave the following details on the timeline:
- At 11:28 a.m., Polito arrived at UNLV in a 2007 Lexus that he parked in a lot south of the business school
- At 11:33 a.m., Polito got out of the car, placed items in his waistband and then entered Beam Hall.
- At 11:45 a.m., the first reports of gunfire came.
University and city police swarmed into and outside the building. UNLV police Chief Adam Garcia has said the first university officer arrived at the business school within 78 seconds of the gunfire report.
Near the main entrance, UNLV officers saw Polito leaving the building and he shot at them, a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department statement said Thursday night.
The officers fired back, killing him at the scene.
Authorities searched Beam Hall and found two people dead on the third floor and one victim dead on the fourth floor, the statement said. Investigators believe the wounded survivor was shot on the fifth floor, but he was able to get to the ground floor.
It’s unclear how many shots Polito fired, but the sheriff said Polito brought more than 150 rounds of ammunition to the campus.
Given that number of rounds, McMahill said he believed Polito may have been intending to open fire on the student union next to the business school, where students were hanging out, eating and playing games.
Polito also was carrying what McMahill described as a “target list” of named faculty members both from UNLV and from East Carolina University in North Carolina, where Polito taught at the university’s business school from 2001 to 2017.
“None of the individuals on the target list became a victim,” McMahill said, adding that police have contacted everyone on the suspect’s list, except for one person who was on a flight.
A dash camera in Polito’s car showed that before heading to campus, he stopped at a post office in Henderson, police said.
Police discovered that he had dropped off 22 letters to university faculty members across the U.S. Some contained an unknown white powder that was later found to be harmless, police said.
And when officers arrived at his apartment Wednesday night to search the property, they found an eviction notice taped to his front door, McMahill said.
Inside, detectives found a chair with an arrow pointing down to a document “similar to a last will and testament,” McMahill said without elaborating.
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