GAUTIER, Miss. — Shannon Lamb's motive for fatally shooting his girlfriend and a university colleague remains largely a mystery: The university instructor had no criminal record, he was a well-liked teacher, and police said there was no history of domestic violence between him and Amy Prentiss.
And yet there were some signs of trouble: Cleveland Police Chief Charles "Buster" Bingham said Tuesday that authorities had some indication Lamb and the second shooting victim, Delta State University professor Ethan Schmidt, did not get along.
A student who praised Lamb, Brandon Beavers, said the professor also seemed agitated and jittery, "like there was something wrong with him." And another student, Mikel Sykes, said Lamb told him he was dealing with stress at the end of the 2014-15 academic year.
Lamb also had asked the university for a medical leave of absence, saying he had a health issue of some sort, university President William LaForge has said.
This year, he was only teaching two online classes, and recent changes in the university's hiring policies meant the doctorate Lamb had worked so hard to earn would not guarantee him an automatic tenure track.
Nonetheless, authorities have not been able to identify any one major factor that would have driven Lamb to shoot two people and then kill himself.
The Cleveland, Miss., campus is about 25 miles from the Arkansas state line.
Police in Gautier said Lamb had no history of violence or criminal record. Schmidt himself had included Lamb in a book he wrote where he acknowledged the "wonderful people" he shared his academic life with.
Bingham said Tuesday that authorities had some indication Lamb and Schmidt did not get along at work. And he said Lamb had told some people that he had a spider bite on his face, which sparked the request for medical leave.
"We've got a lot of questions. We don't have answers yet. You could write this off to a disgruntled employee. There's obviously something there that brought this about," Bingham said.