UNLV gunman resigned past professor job after inappropriate comments: report

A former student of the man who fatally shot three people at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said he resigned from a tenured teaching position after making sexual comments about an outfit she wore to class.

Kristin Marshburn told NBC News the inappropriate remarks came in 2016, during Anthony Polito’s business class at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. She said she was seated in the front row when Polito “said to me that if I wore a shirt that low cut for the rest of the semester, I’d be sure to get an A.”

Marshburn said she was shocked by the “bold comment,” especially given the class size. She told the network another 35 students were present at the time, many of who were also visibly put off by their professor’s commentary.

“I remember their faces just being appalled,” she recalled. “They looked sad for me.”

Marshburn, a Wilmington native, said she reported her professor to the business school’s dean later the same day. Polito, who worked at ECU since 2001 in the marketing and supply chain management department, resigned just months later, in January 2017, according to NBC.

It is unclear whether his departure stemmed from the comment he made to Marshburn, who’d then been about halfway through the fall semester of her junior year. However, Polito never returned to class after he was reported, according to his former student.

On Dec. 6, Polito burst into the building that houses UNLV’s Lee Business School, where he killed three people. He made his way through several floors before he was killed in a shootout with two university detectives outside, said UNLV Police Chief Adam Garcia.

The victims, all of them professors, were identified as Jerry Cha-Jan Chang, 64, a professor of business at the university, Patricia Navarro-Velez, 39, an assistant professor of accounting and Naoko Takemaru, 69, an associate professor of Japanese studies. A fourth person, a 38-year-old male visiting professor, was also wounded during the massacre at UNLV.

Police are still investigating what triggered the deadly violence, but have said Polito unsuccessfully applied for a professor position at the school in 2020. It was not the first time he’d been rejected by the Nevada education system. He’d apparently been struggling to find work, authorities said, leaving him financially strapped and on the brink of eviction.

Marshburn is the second woman to come forward in wake of the shooting with allegations of inappropriate conduct on Polito’s part. A former student, who wished to remain anonymous, recently told NBC News Polito pursued her for nearly an entire semester, contacting her almost every day through email and texts in addition to buying her gifts.

“I felt preyed upon,” she said, adding that she initially viewed Polito as a mentor until he invited her to Las Vegas during her senior year in 2012. “I think that’s about when I was like, ‘I have to cut this man off because he got the wrong idea.’”