Shortly after the fatal shootings at the UofA campus at Huntsville Ala., on friday, and the naming of the suspected shooter, Amy Bishop a woman biology professor, we find out she supposedly accidently killed her brother in their home in 1986 with a blast from a shotgun {according to that link the authorities are reopening that case}.
Well the reports of her past haven't stopped coming in, this next one is just hitting from the Boston.com site:
Alleged Ala. killer was suspect in Harvard professor bomb attempt
The professor who is accused of killing three colleagues at the University of Alabama on Friday was a suspect in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard Medical School professor in 1993, a law enforcement official said today.
Amy Bishop and her husband, James Anderson, were questioned after a package containing two bombs was sent to the Newton home of Dr. Paul Rosenberg, a professor and doctor at Boston's Children's Hospital.
On a return from a vacation the Harvard professor was opening his mail, when he started opening a long thin package he saw some wires and a cylinder, he and his wife took off from the house and called police.
The package contained two 6-inch pipe bombs connected to two nine-volt batteries.
Now how did this Amy Bishop fit into this incident of not yet called terror act, well guess what:
Bishop surfaced as a suspect because she was allegedly concerned that she was going to receive a negative evaluation from Rosenberg on her doctorate work, the official said. The official said investigators believed she had a motive to target Rosenberg and were concerned that she had a history of violence, given that she had shot her brother to death in 1986.
Sound familiar, well in the reports that started surfacing friday and continued she apparently was refused tenure at the University earlier that day. She then attended the meeting of the department sitting quietly through most of it than just pulled out her gun and started shooting!
This report also notes that her husband James Anderson was already know as a tinkerer back then, which also has come out after the shootings, something about a new type of petri dish that they developed and had a grant to manufacture.
The US attorney's office in Boston did not seek any charges against Bishop or Anderson, and no one was ever charged with mailing the bombs to Rosenberg.
Something tells me there's another case being opened as no one was ever charged with the attempted mail pipe bombing.
During a search of Bishop's computer, authorities found a draft of a novel that Bisthop was writing about a female scientist who had killed her brother and was hoping to make amends by hoping to become a great scientist, according to a person who was briefed on the investigation and spoke to the Globe on the condition of anonymity.
Snip
Sylvia Fluckiger, a lab technician who worked with Bishop at the time, said Bishop had been in a dispute with Rosenberg shortly before the bombs were discovered.
Shortly after the attempted bombing, Fluckiger said, Bishop told her she had been questioned by police one day in the lab. According to Fluckiger, Bishop said police asked her if she had ever taken stamps off an envelope that had been mailed to her and put them on something else.
"She said it with a smirk on her face,'' said Fluckiger. "We also knew her husband was a tinkerer. We knew she had a beef with Paul Rosenberg. And we really thought it was a really unbelievable coincidence that he would get those bombs." >>>>>
The shooting of her brother was considered an accident but the reports coming out seem to show that there really wasn't much of an investigation into that, more of just taking hers and her mothers word that that's how it happened. Than some seven years later her name comes up as a suspect in an attempted mail pipe bombing and the investigation seems to just end with no arrests and her and her husband just moving on. Then friday all hell breaks loose in a room of a University leaving three dead and this Amy Bishop speaking rather incoherantly that they weren't shot nor was anyone dead.
As to the shooting I haven't seen anything as to who owned the guns, which leaves me to think they were hers and she held all the proper needs to own and carry.