Things just get more and more disturbing in the case of Amy Bishop. For anyone who isn't up to speed....Amy Bishop is the 44 year old college professor who, while attending a Biology Dept. meeting, pulled out a 9 millimeter handgun and began shooting those closest to her. She shot a total of six colleagues, 3 of whom died.
Now it's come to light that Dr. Bishop fatally shot her 18 year old brother some years ago. The shooting was ruled an accident. Here are details of events following the shooting,
http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1232944A former auto-body worker claims Amy Bishop put a gun to his chest and demanded a getaway car just minutes after she shot her brother to death 24 years ago in a controversial case that is now being reviewed.
Tom Pettigrew, 45, told the Herald he was working at the Dave Dinger Ford auto repair shop in South Braintree, near the former Bishop home, when he saw the gun-wielding woman run into the dealership with what he thought was a BB gun.
Pettigrew, of Quincy, who was 22 at the time, recalled telling his co-oworkers: “I’m like, ‘Did I just see what I just saw?’ ”
Pettigrew said he heard noise coming from where car keys are stored, so he went to investigate.
“I go over to the door and I can sense that she’s right near the door,” Pettigrew said. “I’m thinking it’s a BB gun. I open the door and she’s right there and we basically bumped into each other and I got a shotgun right in my chest!”
“And she’s like, ‘Hands up!’ and I’m like, ‘Yes ma’am’ ”
Bishop appeared agitated and nervous, Pettigrew said. The University of Alabama professor now accused of killing three colleagues Friday said she needed a car because, “I got into a fight with my husband and he’s going to kill me,” the worker recalled.
Pettigrew then watched as Bishop walked through the dealership looking at cars, all the while grasping the gun.
By then, police arrived and swarmed the parking lot. One armed officer climbed up on a nearby roof, Pettigrew said, and could have taken her out.
Instead, they arrested her. Braintree police Chief Paul Frazier has said officers on duty claim they were forced by retired former Chief John Polio to let Bishop, whose mother was a member of the police personnel board, go. Polio denies that and said then-District Attorney William Delahunt investigated the case and ruled it an accident.
Pettigrew said police questioned him after the incident but he never heard from them again.
Michelle Malkin documents additional details of disturbing, aggressive and erratic behavior by Ms. Bishop,
http://michellemalkin.com/2010/02/17/i-am-dr-amy-bishop/The woman was out of control. Law enforcement officers knew it. Her family knew it. Academia must have known it. How many more incidents like this will be disclosed before we stop the charade of plausible deniability? And how did she continue to get pass after pass? Who vouched for her? Who will take responsibility?
Via the Boston Globe:
Amy Bishop was charged with assault in 2002 IHOP dispute
In March, 2002, Bishop walked into an International House of Pancakes in Peabody
with her family, asked for a booster seat for one of her children, and learned the last seat had gone to another mother.
Bishop, according to a police report, strode over to the other woman, demanded the seat and launched into a profanity-laced rant.
When the woman would not give the seat up, Bishop punched her in the head, all the while yelling “I am Dr. Amy Bishop.”
***
Thanks to commenters below, here are links to the latest
stories showing that students and professors knew Amy Bishop was a dangerous
loon:
Professor Had Raised Concerns About Accused Shooter’s Mental Health
Her colleagues agree that she could be unusual. William Setzer, chairman of the chemistry department, recalls that she would interrupt meetings with bizarre tangents, “left field kind of stuff.” Robert O. Lawton, a biology professor who was in the room during the shooting but escaped unscathed, also thought she could be strange, but said she wasn’t the strangest academic he’d run across in his long career.
Another professor, however, has long been wary of Ms. Bishop. He asked The Chronicle not to use his name because, considering recent events, he is worried about his own safety. The professor, who was a member of Ms. Bishop’s tenure-review committee, said he first became concerned about Ms. Bishop’s mental health “about five minutes after I met her.”
The professor said that during a meeting of the tenure-review committee, he expressed his opinion that Ms. Bishop was “crazy.” Word of what he said made it back to Ms. Bishop. In September, after her tenure denial, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging gender discrimination. The professor’s remark was going to be used as possible evidence in that case.
And students complained:
Students said they signed a petition and complained to no avail about the classroom conduct of an Alabama professor accused of killing three colleagues and wounding three others in a shooting rampage at a faculty meeting.
The students upset with biology professor Amy Bishop told The Associated Press they went to University of Alabama in Huntsville administrators at least three times a year ago, complaining that she was ineffective in the classroom and had odd, unsettling ways.
The students said Bishop never made eye contact during conversations, taught by reading out of a textbook and made frequent references to Harvard University, her beloved alma mater.
“We could tell something was off, that she was not like other teachers,” said nursing
student Caitlin Phillips.
Despite the myriad of disturbing incidences and events, Amy Bishop was still allowed to go blithely about her life. One would question why Ms. Bishop was even free to commit her most recent murders after the death of her brother....a case that appears to have been grossly mishandled.
Along with additional accounts of alarming behavior by Ms. Bishop, 'The New York Times' documents details about the (mis)handling of the shooting of Amy Bishop's brother, Seth.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/21/us/21bishop.html?pagewanted=3
Police officers began to question Amy, but her mother arrived and told her not to answer any more questions. Paul Frazier, the current police chief of Braintree, said that Amy Bishop’s release “did not sit well with these officers,” and that the lieutenant in charge of booking that night told him a higher-up had given instructions to stop the booking process.
In an interview Wednesday, the area’s current prosecutor, William R. Keating, district attorney of Norfolk County, was highly critical of the handling of the shooting 24 years ago, particularly because it appears that Amy Bishop’s actions after her brother’s shooting — demanding a car at gunpoint and refusing an officer’s orders to drop the gun — were not conveyed to state authorities who investigated the case.
“It’s not a minor thing that would be omitted,” Mr. Keating said. Mr. Keating said Amy Bishop could have been charged with weapons and assault felonies, which would probably have prompted a psychiatric evaluation. Had such a charge, or any of the others that followed, been on her record, it could have changed the course of Dr. Bishop’s career, and the fate of those who died in Huntsville.
Instead, the investigation was stopped.
Did someone intervene to save Amy Bishop from prosecution? Her mother served on the town committee, an elected legislative panel of 240 members that set the town’s
spending. Or was Amy’s release merely a town’s way of caring for its own, the
way small towns do?
That night, after the gory mess in the kitchen had been cleaned up by helpful neighbors, one of the investigating officers, Billy Finn, stopped by to see if the family needed food.
“You cannot imagine how kind the Braintree police were to us,” Judy Bishop told The Braintree Forum and Observer a week later.
Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts has ordered the State Police to review its role in the case, and the district attorney is also conducting an inquiry.
If Ms. Bishop's actions are recieved in a manner similar to those of Marc Lepine (shooter in the Montreal Massacre), we should expect to see this incident used as a platform to address violence perpetrated by women. We should expect to see a movement formed to counter the death, terror and brutality inflicted upon the innocent masses by evil, violent women.
More likely, we'll see the question posed over and over....How did society fail Amy Bishop? What outside influences pushed her to commit such horrific atrocities?
Society did indeed fail. It failed 18 year old Seth Bishop whose death no one even bothered to investigate. It failed the untold number of individuals Ms. Bishop was allowed to terrorize over the years with her violent, erratic behavior. It failed the three people she fatally shot and the other three she wounded. Had, at any point, Ms. Bishop been held accountable for her actions, 3 people would probably still be alive.
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