TUCSON, Ariz. — An aggrieved student killed three instructors at the University of Arizona nursing school Monday morning and then fatally shot himself, the Tucson police said. The medical complex at the university was locked down as Tucson police and bomb squad officers searched for explosives.
The police identified the gunman as Robert S. Flores Jr., 41, a student at the nursing school. College officials said he was failing his course work and fellow students described him as belligerent and potentially dangerous. A school staff member raised an alarm about him more than a year ago, saying he was depressed and capable of violence, but there had been no follow-up action taken, according to the chief of the university’s police force.
Richard Miranda, chief of the Tucson city police, said Flores apparently entered the nursing school building shortly before 8:30 Monday morning and methodically sought out his victims, all of them female nursing instructors.
The first victim was Robin E. Rogers, 50, who was shot multiple times with a handgun as she worked in her office on the second floor, Miranda said.
Flores then walked into a fourth-floor classroom and shot his second victim, Barbara Monroe, as she stood in front of about 20 students in a class on critical care. Several students in an adjacent classroom called campus and Tucson police.
But before they responded, the police said, Flores walked to the back of the classroom and shot his final victim, Cheryl McGaffic, 44. He then turned to two students he apparently knew and ordered them to leave the classroom, witnesses told the police. Moments later, he released the remaining students, who ran in terror to other classrooms or out into the parking lot next to the medical complex. The police quickly rounded up the witnesses and sequestered them in a building housing the university’s office of alumni affairs.
Flores then apparently shot himself, Miranda said, falling on a backpack that the police feared might contain explosives. By late Monday afternoon the police still had not moved Flores’ body as they tried to determine if the backpack posed a danger.
U. of Arizona student kills three teachers, self
Daily Emerald
October 28, 2002
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