Amy Bishop charged with 2002 assault at IHOP (Alabama Shooter)

Source: Huntsville Times

HUNTSVILLE, AL -- Police reports show that in 2002, UAH shooting suspect Amy Bishop punched a woman in the head for not giving her child a booster seat at a restaurant, all the while yelling, "I am Dr. Amy Bishop."

In March of that year, Bishop went to an International House of Pancakes in Massachusetts with family and asked for a booster seat for one of her children, according to The Boston Globe. When she found out another mother had gotten the seat, she walked over to the woman, demanded the seat and yelled profanities at her, according to the police report.

When the woman refused to give up the seat, she punched her in the head and yelled "I am Dr. Amy Bishop."

The Globe said Bishop received probation and prosecutors recommended that she be sent to anger management classes. It's unclear if she ever went. The victim in the assault declined to talk to the Boston newspaper.


Read more: http://blog.al.com/breaking/2010/02/amy_bishop_charged_with_2002_a.html

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This woman was a time bomb!

that it just didn't look like the different police jurisdictions were communicating effectively about this woman. Sometimes I wonder whether the Harvard affiliation somehow insulated her. Imagine being one of those alabama families reading about all of this.

How did she get this far?

about this story the crazier it gets. I'm worried about her kids! I can't imagine how she must have scared them with her behavior. Putting aside the shootings (as if one could) if she's acting like this in public imagine how she must be acting in the privacy of her own home.

I'm no doctor but it seems pretty obvious to me that this woman needed psychiatric help a long time ago.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (AP) — Students banded together to let administrators know something wasn't quite right about Professor Amy Bishop. She taught by reading straight out of the textbook, never made eye contact and liked to remind people constantly that she went to Harvard.

"We could tell something was off, that she was not like other teachers," said nursing student Caitlin Phillips, who was among those who complained to administrators at least three times a year ago that the biology professor was unsettling and ineffective in the classroom. Some students also signed a petition against Bishop.

Students said they had no reason to think she might turn violent. But after Bishop's arrest Friday on charges of shooting to death three colleagues during a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, the complaints add to the picture that has emerged of her as a brilliant but erratic figure.

While police have not released a motive for the shootings, colleagues said the 44-year-old neuroscientist was simmering with resentment over being denied tenure last March.

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-02-16-alabama-professor-shooting_N.htm

Both Professors. Hmmm. Wonder why the big difference??

Let's see. Bishop killed people. Gates demanded to be treated civilly in his own home.

And while I'm writing - what is with the repeated references to Harvard and the suggestion, in another post, that it "insulated" her. Her educational background is essentially irrelevant, unless we were asked to evaluate her work or take her classes. Being educated at an Ivy League school does not insulate someone from being charged with crimes. In the case of Bishop, it was a fairly obviously a crime.

My point was everything pointed that Gates was OK but he was treated like a criminal and this lady actually WAS a criminal yet seemingly was never really punished and treated with kid gloves. Was the difference race? Connections? What?

Bishop has a history of bizarre and violent behavior, including murder, yet the system seems to have given her pass after pass.

I read "Both professors. Hmm. Wonder why the big difference?" as:

- Bishop blows her top, or behaves bizarrely, repeatedly, and is never disciplined, fired, arrested, etc.
- Gates blows his top, and is instantly hauled off as an immediate threat to public safety.

I think it's a fair and interesting question, that strikes right to heart of the topic.
How/when do we decide somebody represents a threat that justifies official intervention?

Sure, it's clear *NOW* that Bishop was a bomb waiting to go off.
The "picture on the ground" two weeks ago might not have been so clear.

J.

She just didn't receive prison time. She got probation instead. At that point, her record was clean -- technically, because the police hadn't charged her in her brother's 1986 killing -- and so probation was what most people would have gotten.


ETA: http://www.thebostonchannel.com/news/22587820/detail.html

It was one of those 'stay out of trouble for 6 months and we'll pretend it didn't happen' sort of things.

I think it's a fair and interesting question, that strikes right to heart of the topic.

Yes, I agree, and the way you put the two cases side-by-side says it all.

I think middle-aged or older white female academics can get away with a lot. Eccentricity is tolerated easily.

Temper tantrums and bad behavior can be chalked off to "pressure" or "the change."


Cher

academics are well behaved so there is nothing to get away with.

The one I'm thinking of in particular, he just got promoted to a point where he didn't have to deal with students. :shrug:

The problem is, a bunch of people see *a* sign, but there's nobody that sees them all, until something bad happens and an investigation starts. Then the pattern becomes clear.

Honestly, I don't know which is worse: that states or the feds don't have a way to track this kind of threat, or that they might go build a way to track them.

Probably if they did build such a tracking system, it would get so filled with dubious information that it becomes useless. In almost any contest between statistical pattern recognition algorithms ("profiling") and large data sets, the algorithm loses ( a false positive rate of 0.1%, given 300,000,000 people to evaluate, will produce a long and almost entirely bogus list of names. )

Given the pressures that many grad students and post-docs work under, I'm surprised this doesn't happen every week. (Please understand that I'm not excusing this person, just pointing out that post-bac academic pursuits are mega-stressful, and not everyone is up to it.)

This isn't anything new, either; look up the case of Theodore Streleski.

J.

(a faculty member) told me that if I saw this other faculty member walking the halls in a trenchcoat, lock the door and stay in my lab. Apparently she was a loon, carried a gun, had bouts of paranoia where she thought everyone was conspiring with the KKK against her (which made no sense, she wasn't a minority), AND was under dossier review for tenure.

I guess we all should consider ourselves lucky that she didn't do something similar when they suggested she leave.

The point is that administration and peers knew this about her and still let her teach classes, counsel students, serve on committees, etc. because she did her day-to-day job satisfactorily, yet faculty were warning staff to be on the lookout and to protect themselves for years before she left. They said it was a 'touchy' personnel issue. Admins said they couldn't confront her about it since it was a private health issue, other faculty were afraid of her so nobody did anything. Scary!

That very well may have been the case there, except that their time ran out.