The madman who slaughtered three people in a mass shooting at the University of Nevada Las Vegas on Wednesday was a professor who failed to secure a job at the school and claimed to have solved the mystery of the Zodiac Killer and missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370.
Anthony Polito, 67, had unsuccessfully applied for a professorship at UNLV before he unleashed his deadly rampage on the campus just before noon, law enforcement sources told ABC News.
Polito was armed with a handgun during his massacre and was killed following a shootout with two police detectives, the outlet reported.
The shooting began around 11:45 a.m. on the fourth floor of Beam Hall, UNLV’s business school, near the student union building.
Police found three people dead when they arrived.
A fourth person was taken to an area hospital, where they were listed in critical but stable condition.
Four others were hospitalized after suffering panic attacks and two officers were treated for minor injuries suffered while clearing buildings, LVMPD police said.
Polito’s LinkedIn account states he was a “semi-retired university professor” based in Las Vegas and attended undergraduate at Radford University in Virginia, where he graduated with a double major in mathematics and statistics before he earned his master’s degree at Duke University and completed his doctorate of philosophy at the University of Georgia.
He served as an associate professor for 15½ years at East Carolina University from August 2001 to January 2017.
During that time, he also ran a personal website about his life, in which he posted a 15-page theory claiming he decoded the messages left by the Zodiac Killer, who operated in Northern California in the late 1960s.
“Just so you won’t initially write off my solution as that of a total crackpot, let me first say that I have been a member of MENSA for 35 years, I hold a double undergraduate degree in Mathematics & Statistics (two skills closely associated with successful cryptographers) … and I hold a masters degree and a doctoral degree from top-tier universities as well,” Polito wrote in the introduction.
“So I am not a dumb guy!”
He further claimed to have solved the fate of Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 and figured out the true meaning of Leonardo DiCaprio’s 2010 film “Inception.”
Hellbound and Down 