… Tenured Radical (we’ve never met; I feel closer to her now) describes what it was like to be on campus (she teaches at Wesleyan) while the killing was happening.

… in a bookstore near the campus. More details in a moment.

Middletown Mayor Sebastian Giuliano said he did not believe the public was in danger.

“It was focused. This wasn’t random from what I can tell,” Giuliano said. “Somebody went into a bookstore and fired multiple shots at one person.”

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… [A] 20-year-old female student’s ex-boyfriend walked into the bookstore and shot her five times.

The sources say they know who the gunman is…

… in this morning’s New York Times that he insisted on reading them aloud across the breakfast table to UD.

1.) The managing director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, is a notorious letch. A French satirist, Stéphane Guillon, describes a recent visit of his to Radio France:

To prepare for Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s entry into the building at Radio France, Mr. Guillon said, “exceptional measures have been taken in order not to awaken the beast,” including the banning of high heels and leather pants. The head of publicity would greet him in a burqa, and “at the sound of a siren, Stage 5 of the alert system, all female workers must be evacuated.”

2.)

… Germany takes a highly regimented approach to naming. Children’s names must be approved by local authorities, and there is a reference work, the International Handbook of Forenames, to guide them. Jürgen Udolph, a University of Leipzig professor and head of the information center there that provides certificates of approval for names that have not yet made the official list, said that “the state has a responsibility to protect people from idiotic forenames.”

… was in his ditched car.

Looks more and more likely that he’s made, as some wag said of Elvis, a good career move.

…[T]he red Jeep Liberty was found in Bogart, an Athens suburb in northwestern Clarke County. … [T]he vehicle was positioned in a way to make the scene look like an accident.

Not sure what this last bit means. Drove it into a tree?

Some sources have Zinkhan with a drug or alcohol problem. Isn’t it possible he did the deed high, then drove the car high, then crashed it not on purpose? And started running?

I know. He drove his kids to a neighbor’s house and calmly told the neighbor to watch them because there had been an emergency. But a person’s capable of remaining calm under the influence.

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Drove it into a ditch.

And, I mean, how far off was UD?

UD said he’d ditched the car by pushing it into a body of water.

She was close.

It was deep in a ravine.

[A police spokesman said] the Jeep was found in a ravine, “well off the beaten path.”

“You can’t see it from the road, which explains why we couldn’t find it.”

… at the height of spring, and as you know if you read UD with care, her town is an old, well-tended arboretum.

As the cab from the airport drove down Argyle Hill, the driver AND UD, who has had decades to get used to Garrett Park in the spring, both gasped.

It was the whiteness of the dogwoods pouring down the hill to Wells Park that got to UD and the cabbie.  Massed, moving with the car and the wind, bright against the afternoon’s dreariness, the trees glittered like ocean foam.

Underneath them, white hosta flowers and white azaleas churned.  Above, the ancient town evergreens ruled the waves.

More than enough compensation for my loss of the tropical sun.

… you see every day.

… if true.

… at the University of Delaware.

… sort of theory should be aware of this.

… Zinkhan didn’t set the schedule for a planned trip to Amsterdam or even buy the airline ticket for the flight out of Atlanta.

Harmen Verbruggen, dean of Vrije Universiteit (Free University) in Amsterdam — where Zinkhan has taught part-time for two years — invited Zinkhan to help the university start up a marketing master’s program, Verbruggen told the newspaper Tuesday. The dean’s secretary made travel arrangements with Delta Air Lines three or four days before the triple homicide, he said.

Zinkhan’s travel plans had been widely reported as an indication he had planned to flee to Europe after the shootings.

At this point, I’m seeing him push his car into a body of water and then head for the remotest part of the Appalachian Trail he knows and shoot himself.

… is haunting the Democratic party.

Via Wendy, a reader.

Three people have been shot and killed in Athens, Georgia, and police are looking for a professor at the University of Georgia, George Zinkhan, in connection with the killings.

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Update:  Seems to have killed his wife and two bystanders.

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Another Update:  An earlier UD post on the subject of professors who murder.  All of the cases she’s encountered since starting this blog involve men murdering their wives — estranged, ex-, current.  (The man featured in the post, Rafael Robb of the University of Pennsylvania, eventually confessed.)

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Witnesses.

… [A]n argument between the suspect, who was well known to the theatre group, and an unidentified man immediately preceded the shootings.

According to [police], witnesses told police that Zinkhan left the event and returned a few minutes later with two handguns. He fired both guns… and afterward walked away, got in a car and drove off.

…“At high level of threat for anyone who comes into contact with him,” said [an investigator].

Adams said after the shootings, Zinkhan apparently took both [of his] children to another neighbor’s home.

“He said he had an emergency,” Adams said Saturday evening. Police questioned neighbors on the street.

The two children are now in police custody…

The two wounded people did not suffer life-threatening injuries… Both were injured by ricochet — one victim in a leg and the other in a foot… Both were taken to St. Mary’s Hospital in Athens.

A man outside the shooting scene said his son was a witness to the slayings.

John Hardy of Conyers said his son, Matt Hardy, was standing next to one of the victims. John Hardy says his son told him that the victim, Tanner, was shot twice — once in the front and the back.

John Hardy said Matt Hardy, who lives in Athens, was a friend of Tanner’s. His son was being questioned by Athens police and released. He declined to comment on what he told investigators.

“At 22 you’re not supposed to watch people die,” said John Hardy.

According to Tanner’s Facebook profile, he has acted in 50 productions, including “Sherlock Holmes – The Final Adventure,” the current play being produced at the theater.

Gary Moon of Athens had just left classes at nearby Piedmont College when he heard gunshots.

“It was like pow, pow, pow. At first I thought it was just somebody fooling around with a cap gun or something,” Moon said. “Then I saw a lady who was walking her dog. She took off running and screaming down the street.”

Moon called 911 and reported the shooting, then drove up to the scene. Trained in CPR he sought to help. “I was too late. There wasn’t anything I could do.”…

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A couple of random thoughts:

1.) I think it likely that Zinkhan will be found dead by his own hand.

2.) I would guess that Zinkhan and his wife were estranged, and that the man with whom he had an argument before leaving and returning with guns was protecting her from Zinkhan.

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This report calls Marie Bruce Zinkhan’s ex-wife.

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Ex-wife, but apparently they still lived together in the same house with their two children.

Was she going to move out? Had she fallen in love with one of the men Zinkhan apparently argued with and then returned to shoot? If she’d told Zinkhan she was leaving him to move in with a lover, that could have set him off. Custody issues, too, would have played a part in his rage, as they did in the case of Thomas Murray and Raphael Robb, two other professors who killed their wives.

The profile here, whether it turns out to match Zinkhan or not, is that of a control freak who thinks he’s a genius to whom no rules apply. And who’s not going to let some woman get away with messing up the carefully crafted pattern of his life.

A professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College who was fired over plagiarism allegations is suing the graduate school for $200 million.

Madonna Constantine filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court on Tuesday calling her 2008 firing an “academic lynching.”

Constantine was a clinical psychology professor at Teachers College, which is affiliated with Columbia University. She says her firing was fueled by “academic rivalry and political intrigue.”

Teachers College says the lawsuit has no merit and intends to defend itself vigorously.

Constantine’s firing came after a noose was found dangling from her office door. Police never determined who put it there…

Associated Press.

… weren’t grim enough.

Feral rabbits have been the bane of the University of Victoria for years, but now the problem is moving off campus.

No one knows when the first rabbit appeared on campus, but an estimated 1,500 of them currently call it home.

The university has come under pressure to cull the animals by angry neighbours but how that might be accomplished is fuelling a raging debate.

Proponents of the doomsday approach have taken a shine to something called the Rodenator.

The device, according to its U.S. manufacturer, “delivers a precisely measured mixture of propane and oxygen into the tunnel or burrow of invasive pests. This mixture is then detonated by the operator, causing an instantaneous underground shock wave of concussive force that eliminates the pests and in some (species specific) cases collapses some of the existing tunnel structure thus preventing immediate reinfestation.”

Not surprisingly, animal rights advocates are not wild about that option, and university officials have said they plan to try non-lethal approaches first.

Local veterinarian Nick Shaw has offered to perform vasectomies on the rabbits, but he says even that won’t solve all of the bunny problems…

CBC