Family of slain UA professor file $9 million claim against the Arizona Board of Regents

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The household of slain College of Arizona professor Dr. Thomas Meixner has filed a discover of a $9 million declare in opposition to the Arizona Board of Regents. The household claims that UA’s “pass-the-buck response to repeated violent threats” led to Meixner’s homicide.

Meixner was killed on campus by alleged shooter Murad Dervish final October. Meixner, together with a pupil and different college, have been topic to over a yr’s value of alleged harassment and threats by Dervish. Experiences of those threats have been despatched to school departments just like the Workplace of Normal Counsel and the College of Arizona Police Division. However Meixners’ attorneys declare “the college’s utter failure to do even the naked minimal, to make sure security on its campus, resulted” within the division head’s demise.

The regulation companies of Zwillinger Wulkan and Kuykendall & Associates are representing Meixner’s widow, Kathleen, and his sons, Sean and Brendan.

Of their declare’s first sentence, they are saying “the College of Arizona sacrificed Professor Tom Meixner’s life, repeatedly ignoring the clear and current hazard of a hostile and harmful pupil who overtly marketed his intent to homicide.”

All through the doc, they element the timeline of occasions main as much as Meixner’s demise. Within the declare, they share the back-and-forth inside communications that affected college and college students obtained from UA departments for months previous to Oct. 5, 2022. Nonetheless, based on the declare, “the College ignored the outcry of scholars and school involved over Dervish’s actions and refused to make the mandatory lodging for the division primarily based on security issues.”

They proceed on to assert that, “the College didn’t, and nonetheless doesn’t, have a complete system to watch and consider such violence dangers, regardless of a recognition that their present inside communication channels are ineffective.”

In that assertion, they harken again to a February School Senate assembly the place UA President Robert Robbins known as for the necessity to work collectively to “mitigate” problems with belief and security. He went on to assert full duty, regardless of not being conscious of the threats previous to the capturing.

The declare compares UA’s violence danger response to “scorching potato.”

“In truth, a number of different claims in opposition to the College reveal inside indifference to those conditions and a sample of passing duty from one division to a different like a scorching potato, moderately than performing in a manner that protects the College neighborhood.”

The Arizona Board of Regents has 60 days to answer the household’s declare. In the event that they fail, the household will file a proper lawsuit.

The Arizona Board of Regents holds the license for AZPM.