US crime professor kills woman before shooting other academic

CHICAGO, USA (UPDATED) – A US university professor who studied the geography of crime is suspected of killing a woman he lived with before driving hours to a university in Mississippi to shoot another professor, police said.

 

Shannon Lamb, a social science professor at Delta State University, then shot himself, police said, after they followed him and he pulled his car over and fled into woodland near the town of Greenville.

 

Officers later heard a single gunshot and found Lamb’s body, Cleveland, Mississippi Police Chief Charles Bingham told a late night news conference.

 

Cleveland is the town where Delta State University is located.

 

Police in the coastal town of Gautier, Mississippi were investigating the murder of a woman in Lamb’s home when they got news of the campus shooting some 300 miles (nearly 500 kilometers) north.

 

The Biloxi Sun Herald reported that the woman lived with Lamb.

 

Delta State University sent out an alert urging students to stay inside and away from windows after an active shooter was spotted on campus.

 

It later confirmed that Ethan Schmidt, a professor of American history, had been killed.

 

Lamb was among a long list of colleagues that Schmidt thanked in his 2014 book “Native Americans in the American Revolution” .

 

Lamb received his doctorate from Delta State last year, according to a faculty profile posted on the university’s website. 

 

His areas of expertise include the geography of crime, social science education, economic geography and high-stakes testing.

 

He joined the university in 2009 and also received his undergraduate and masters degree from Delta State.

 

Delta State is a public university which has more than 4,000 students. It is located in the small town of Cleveland about 120 miles (200 kilometers) north of Jackson, Mississippi. – Rappler.com