The man who fatally shot three people last week at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, had resigned from another school, despite having tenure, after a female student accused him of making a sexual comment about her appearance.
Kristin Marshburn said she was sitting in the front row of Anthony Polito’s business course at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, in 2016 when he walked in and made the remark.
“He 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, now 28, told NBC News.
Marshburn, of Wilmington, North Carolina, said she was shocked by the “bold comment,” as were some of the roughly 35 other students, mostly men, in Polito’s supply chain management course that fall.
“I remember their faces just being appalled,” she said. “They looked sad for me.”
Marshburn said she reported the incident to the business school’s dean that day. Months later, in January 2017, Polito resigned from his tenured associate professor position after having worked at ECU since 2001 in the marketing and supply chain management department, the university said.
It is unclear whether his exit was connected in any way to the comment he made to Marshburn midway through the fall semester of her junior year. Polito never returned to class after Marshburn reported him, she said.
An ECU spokesperson did not directly respond to requests for comment on the circumstances around Polito’s resignation and said a public records request must be submitted for potential disciplinary records. NBC News has filed the request but had not received a response as of Monday.
In previously posted online ramblings — reviewed by NBC News on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which archives web pages — Polito blamed ECU’s higher-ups for costing him his career and destroying his reputation. He also referred to a student who he said helped those higher-ups justify the actions they took against him.
Polito, 67, had a “target…
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