Eerie Letter From University Killer
A day after a nursing student shot three professors to death and killed himself, a newspaper received a 22-page list of grievances from the gunman that began, "Greetings from the dead."
"You have received this letter after a rather horrendous event," Robert S. Flores Jr. wrote, apparently weeks before the slayings. A student who was flunking out of school, he insisted the shootings were not about revenge.
"I guess what it is about is that it is a reckoning," Flores wrote. "A settling of accounts. The university is filled with too many people who are filled with hubris. They feel untouchable."
The letter ends with, "As the curtain closes I will exit the stage for a well deserved rest."
The Arizona Daily Star said it received the letter Tuesday night. Police said Wednesday they had no reason to doubt its authenticity.
Flores, 41, shot three of his instructors at the University of Arizona nursing school to death Monday, then killed himself. The divorced Gulf War veteran killed two of the professors in the same room, telling one "he was going to give her a lesson in spirituality" and asking the other "if she was ready to meet her maker."
The letter gives a chronology of Flores' troubled life — his failed marriage, poor health and slights from a nursing school he claimed treated male students as "tokens" — and tries to explain the shootings.
"I am rational," he writes. "I understand that I have committed homicide and that I have broken the laws of our society. I will save the taxpayers money and take care of the problem. I realize that I am depressed but even with treatment it will not change my future. People will want to know why I did this? Why the innocent lives?
"To the sociologist, it wasn't the Maryland sniper. I have been thinking about this for a while. To the psychiatrist, it's not about unresolved childhood issues. It is not about anger because I don't feel anything right now," the letter said.
The newspaper said the letter was postmarked Monday and was accompanied by college transcripts, military evaluations, recommendations from employers and two birthday cards.
Psychiatrist Jose Santiago, chief medical officer of the Carondelet Health Network in Tucson, said the letter "is a massive attempt to justify what he did."
It's typical of "somebody who is very self-centered and feels imperfections are found in the rest of the world and not in him," he said.
It appears Flores wrote the letter in two stages separated by several weeks, with all but the first two pages written on the eve of the killings. The letter describes him as increasingly hopeless as he faces a bleak future with financial and health problems looming.
"I am tired, tired and weary," the letter says. "Rather than spend the next month or two selling what little I have I am going to end it now."
Students who knew him say Flores was doing poorly in school.
"I know he was very stressed in a lot of different things and had a difficult time adjusting," Kimberly Ammons told CBS News.
"He came across as very aggressive and mean and seemed to have a lot of issues with being angry," said Lori Schenkel, a fellow nursing student.
Sharon Ewing, a clinical professor at the College of Nursing, said it was common knowledge among the faculty that Flores was depressed. She said all three victims had tried to help him.
"Mr. Flores ... conveyed to staff that he was depressed, that he was thinking of ending it all, and that he might take some actions against the College of Medicine," said university police chief Anthony Daykin.