What’s it like to be in the last class your professor holds before committing mass murder?
Dr. Amy Bishop, who never carried a purse to class, dropped her canvas carry-all on the table at the front of the classroom. Without giving a reason, she announced class would be cut short.
“I could see something about eight inches long in her bag, and it was a cylinder shape,” said Rena Webb, a graduate student who usually sat in the front row of Introduction to Neuroscience.
But class on that Friday, Feb. 12, wasn’t cut short…
Bishop had been acting strangely all week. For one thing, she had started yawning during class on Monday and Wednesday.
Also, Bishop had a lazy left eye, Webb said. But in the class just hours before the shooting, it no longer seemed lazy. It seemed fixed.
“She made continuous eye contact with me the entire time we were in there Friday,” said Webb, “and I felt so uncomfortable. I kept looking up at the projector.”
Webb …watched at one point as Bishop reached for the cylinder inside her canvas bag. “She just moved it so you couldn’t see the outline of it anymore. She didn’t look at it again.”
At 12:25 p.m, after an hour of off-topic talk about unexpressed genes and evolutionary triggers, Bishop said she was going home and would be back in the afternoon to work on a grant proposal.
Webb and others asked if there would be class on Monday, which was Presidents Day. Bishop appeared confused.
“I was just asking if we were going to be here. She said, ‘I don’t know. Do you have class Monday?’” said Webb. “I kind of felt like she wasn’t coming back on Monday. I didn’t know if she was going to quit.”…
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February 23rd, 2010 at 5:43AM
Hmm, I dunno about this. Nobody seems to have thought much about these Sinister Harbingers of Doom at the time. The comment about President’s Day strikes me as the sort of thing I might say in a particularly absent-minded day in class. Isn’t the really terrifying thing about Bishop’s last day as a professor its ordinariness, the cool matter-of-fact way she prepared to commit an atrocity?