University of Iowa shooting Information

The University of Iowa shooting was a mass shooting that occurred in Iowa City, Iowa, on November 1, 1991. Gang Lu, a 28-year-old former graduate student at the University of Iowa, killed four members of the faculty and a student then seriously injured another student at the universitys campus before committing suicide.

Gang Lu (born 1962) (Chinese: 卢刚; pinyin: Lú Gāng), was a 28-year-old Chinese graduate student at the University of Iowa who had received his doctoral degree in physics and astronomy from the university in May 1991. In 1984, 18-year-old Lu began studying physics at Peking University in Beijing, where he passed the CUSPEA exam and was admitted to study in the United States, becoming a graduate student at the University of Iowa. As a graduate student, Lu was primarily a loner who was perceived by at least one other graduate student to have a psychological problem if challenged and was reported to have had abusive tantrums. Lu was infuriated because his dissertation, titled Study of the "Critical Ionization Velocity" Effect by Particle-in-Cell Simulation, did not receive the prestigious D.C. Spriestersbach Dissertation Prize, which included a monetary award of $2,500. The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 led many Chinese students to become eager to stay in the United States, and Lu believed that winning the prize would have made it easier for him to get a job and not have to return to China. Normally, Lu would have gotten a postdoctoral researcher position, but there was not enough money to support him.

In the months prior to the shooting, Lu was still living in Iowa City and wrote five letters explaining the reasons for his planned actions. According to university officials, four of the letters were in English and one written in Chinese, intended to be mailed to news organizations. The letters have never been released to the public.

On Friday, November 1, 1991, Gang Lu attended a meeting for the theoretical space plasma physics research group in a conference room on the third floor of Van Allen Hall at the universitys campus. A few minutes after the meeting began, Lu shot three attendees of the meeting with a .38-caliber revolver, then proceeded to the second floor to shoot the chairman of the department in his office. Those who were shot in Van Allen Hall were:

After the shootings at Van Allen Hall, Lu walked three blocks to Jessup Hall to the office of T. Anne Cleary, an associate vice president for Academic Affairs and grievance officer at the university, and shot her in the head. Lu had filed several grievances about not being nominated for the Spriestersbach prize. Cleary died the following day at the University of Iowa Hospital. Lu then shot Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, a 23-year-old student temporary employee in the Office of Academic Affairs, for unknown reasons. Rodolfo-Sioson survived but was left paralyzed from the neck down, and died from inflammatory breast cancer in 2008. Lu had intended to kill university president Hunter Rawlings III, but he was attending the Iowa/Ohio State football game in Columbus, Ohio at the time. Gang Lu was found in room 203 of Jessup Hall with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, and he died shortly after police arrived.

Writer Jo Ann Beard wrote an acclaimed personal essay based in part on the killings. Her essay, entitled "The Fourth State of Matter", was originally published in The New Yorker. It appeared in the 1997 edition of Best American Essays. The essay was later included in her collection of personal essays, The Boys of My Youth. Beard worked as an editor for a physics journal at the university and was a colleague of the victims. She had been close friends with Goertz.

Loosely based on Gang Lus story, Chinese director Chen Shi-zheng made a feature film, Dark Matter, starring Liu Ye and Meryl Streep. However, the story in Dark Matter has substantial differences in plot and character motivation. The film won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at the Sundance Film Festival in 2007.

The educational series Discovering Psychology, "Cultural Psychology" (Episode 26, updated edition) discusses Gang Lu (at the 3:50 minute mark)

A documentary about the life of the lone survivor, Miya Rodolfo-Sioson, entitled Miya of the Quiet Strength, was released in 2009.

Complete article available at this page.