UNLV looks to move forward after shooting as spring semester looms

UNLV leadership on Tuesday held its first in-person, all-hands meeting with staff and faculty since the December shooting that left three professors dead and wounded a fourth.

Among the topics addressed: campus safety, mental health resources, the shooting investigation, a future permanent memorial, and the ways the university intends to move forward following the tragedy.

“I’m staying away from the word normalcy,” UNLV President Keith Whitfield told the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Monday when asked if the university was prepared for a new normal.

“From my perspective,” he told a packed ballroom Tuesday. “I’m not trying to rush us to get to the, quote on quote, other side.”

“We’re all going to heal and move from this differently, but we do have to move forward,” he added. “We cannot go backwards; we have to figure out a way to go forward.”

The two-hour meeting Tuesday came on the heels of this week’s return of all faculty and staff returned to campus for the first time since an active shooter terrorized them.

The spring semester kicks off next week.

Gunman Anthony Polito, 67, died in a shootout with school police, according to the Metropolitan Police Department.

Polito had been turned down for jobs at UNLV and other Nevada higher education institutions, according to Las Vegas police.

His victims inside Beam Hall were Patricia Navarro Velez, 39; Cha Jan “Jerry” Chang, 64; Naoko Takemaru, 69, and a fourth professor who suffered life-threatening injuries.

Whitfield said Beam Hall will be closed to students and the general public through the spring semester while repairs continue.

Asked if it will reopen after, Whitfield said, “That will be ‘wait and see.’ You can’t really tell how people are going to respond” to returning to the building.

Whitfield also told the Review-Journal that he and his staff had been in touch with the surviving professor, who wants to remain anonymous.

“He’s such a wonderful soul and really is just focusing on his healing more than anything else,” Whitfield said.

UNLV police Chief Adam Garcia said Tuesday that his department’s investigations are ongoing, including looking into the police shooting and a racist email sent to Black faculty after the shootings.

Las Vegas police are conducting their own investigation but recently released several hours of body-camera footage.

“We don’t know what the motive is,” Garcia said, likening it to the Oct. 1, 2017, mass shooting investigation.“We don’t know if we’ll ever know the motive.”

“We can make a lot of assumptions, but I will ask again to be patient as we move forward with these investigations,” Garcia said.

Like Las Vegas police, Garcia said his department’s findings will be made public once completed.

Newly formed committees will examine campus safety, including the possible addition of locks, cameras, and a “plethora of possible enhancements,” Garcia said, while adding, “I’m not guaranteeing that we’ll have metal detectors and panic button.”

UNLV Provost Chris Heavey spoke about UNLV having to move forward after yet another crisis.

“During COVID, we used that word, ‘unprecedented,’ so many times,” he said, “I thought we’d never have to use it again.”

Heavey said that UNLV waived holds, such as ones for small debts, and that enrollment was slightly higher for the upcoming semester compared with a year ago.

UNLV Faculty Senate Chair Bill Robinson, an assistant professor at the Lee School in Beam Hall, is spearheading a memorial plans to commemorate those lost.

“You can’t stop these things from happening,” he said about the shooting, “but we can do our best to try to protect and to try making people feel safe.”

Casey Wyman, UNLV’s chief financial officer, said that about 500 doors across 21 buildings needed to be repaired or replaced at a cost estimated at $1 million.

“You never think how important a door is until you don’t have one or something happens to it,” Whitfield told the Review-Journal.

Wyman said some of the total costs suffered because of the shooting, including disruptions, would be claimed through insurance companies. He said UNLV would look into federal grants for security updates.

Michelle Paul, executive director of UNLV’s mental health clinic, gave a lengthy presentation on trauma and highlighted tools to respond to it.

Whitfield, a psychology scholar, told the Review-Journal about emotional repercussions suffered because of the shooting.

“My only issue is that everybody’s not OK,” he said. “I have to be OK because our university has to be OK.”

A previous version of this story misstated the length of the shooting.

Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com.