By Janet Singleton

Several days have passed since Maria Ragland Davis, Adriel Johnson, and Gopi Podila were murdered in a mass shooting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). But what could make the point blank killings of three innocent PhD scientists even more disheartening? Davis was known as a highly accomplished and kind woman beloved by her students. Her sister-in-law praised her for being a wonderful stepmother, who help husband Sammie, widowed previously, raise three children. Johnson was said to be stern, witty, and “a class act.” He leaves behind a wife and two sons. Both African American scientists are remembered for their tireless work encouraging promising young black students to go into the field. Florence Holland, an Auburn University administrator, told the AP: “Some people when they get to a certain level of success are like I got mine you get yours, but Dr. Johnson wasn’t like that.” Podila, UAH department chairman, a brilliant biotechnologist, caring administrator and mentor, husband and father of two teenage girls.

It would seem bad enough that such talented and dedicated people are no longer with us. What makes it worse is that evidence keeps piling up that suggests – insists is perhaps the better word – that their alleged murderer, Amy Bishop, was a woman with a twenty-year history of violence. Thus, she never should have been seated with them that day, meeting in UAH conference room that she turned into a grassless killing field. The raging white professor had not been charged in the 1986 killing of her brother, taking two hostages in the shooting’s aftermath. She had been questioned but not charged in 1993 during an investigation about a pipe bomb sent to a Harvard professor’s home. And in 2002 she was accused of hitting a woman in the head during an argument in a restaurant.

Crime and race have been perverse bedfellows in American history. And the cross-racial violence tends to arouse more public discomfort than does monochromatic carnage. In 2007, after Virginia Tech killer Seung Hui Cho, went on a rampage killing 32, the Korean community expressed shock and humiliation.

Reportedly, some Asian American students locked themselves in their rooms, feeling shame and fearing ethnic retribution.After Major Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 at Fort Hood, Texas,in 2008, the response from the US Middle Eastern community was similar. “Muslim, Arab Groups Condemn Fort Hood Shooting, Brace for Backlash,” headlined a story in the Huffington Post.

True to anticipation, Cho’s and Hasan’s actions sent racial allegations whipping through the blogosphere. Cho’s legal immigration status was repeated criticized, though his is sister was an Ivy-League graduate and the rest of his family law-abiding residents. Far right politicos tried to connect Hasan to President Obama – even, though the two are complete strangers – because Hasan attended one of Obama’s election campaign speeches.

But the words “complete stranger” can lose their meaning when it comes to race and crime. This is why so may of us, black, brown, and yellow, have held our breaths upon hearing of a grand scale shooting or act of terrorism in the news. We do not think for a moment that some shooter across the country is intimately known to us. But we are afraid that he is “one of us.”

And if he is, goodness forbid, many of us feel shame or the need to apologize. Yet in Braintree, Massachusetts in 1986 that day when one of their own picked up a 12-gauge rifle, fired three shots, the second of which blew out her brother’s chest, shame apparently did not surface. Amy Bishop reportedly ran from the scene (giving her own meaning to white flight) and into a nearby auto repair shop, according to the Boston Globe, where she pointed the deadly twelve-gauge at two people and demanded a getaway car. Officials in the local district attorney’s office there ruled the shooting a tragic accident.

What terrified teenage girl, who accidentally shoots her brother, keeps shooting? Wouldn’t it be more likely that an innocent kid would scream, throw down the gun, rush to her brother’s aid or rush for help?

I do not know what happened between Bishop and her brother that day. But one thing I do know is that the requirements of reasonable and civilized behavior demanded further inquiry about why the case was closed and Bishop was allowed to go out into the world, where she became a live grenade in the pressure cooker of academia?

And let’s ask another disturbing question. If Maria Ragland Davis, Adriel Johnson, and Gopi Podila had ever shot someone dead, fled the scene, and took hostages, would they have been allowed to work in any capacity at UAH? Easy answer: No, Davis and Johnson, being black, would have been arrested and imprisoned for such shenanigans. Period. Had there been any such record regarding Gopi Podila, who emigrated from India as a graduate student, he would not have been allowed into the country.

Yet in 1986 in her upper class white suburb, Amy Bishop was permitted to walk away from the wreckage she created as if her actions had never occurred.

No wonder, as she was being taking away in a patrol car after the latest horrifying US campus shootings, she kept shaking her head. Despite the fact that three colleagues lay dead, she kept saying, “It didn’t happened.” Maybe that is the mantra they taught her in Braintree, Massachusetts a long time ago.

Janet Singleton is an award-winning freelance journalist and novelist.