yet another microbiologist dies in mysterious circumstances

[multi]

Bizarre stabbing death of professor has Missouri campus stunned, baffled




COLUMBIA, Mo. - Friends recall Jeong Im as smart, quiet, dignified and friendly, as eager to mentor a student as to share vegetables from his home garden, the kind of person prized in academic halls and cozy neighborhoods.

That's why last week's stabbing death of the 72-year-old Im, a semiretired protein chemist who studied by candlelight as a young man in Korea, has stunned the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Im's body was found Friday afternoon in the trunk of his burning car on the third floor of a university parking garage. It was the first homicide reported at the campus since the late 1980s, said University of Missouri Police spokesman Capt. Brian Weimer.

Police have released a composite sketch of a person of interest, wearing a hood and the type of oval face mask used by painters, but there have been no arrests - and thus no answers for a baffled community.

"Everybody is shocked. This was a gentle man. He loved classical music, spoke softly and was so warm inside," the Rev. Chang Yul Lee of Columbia's Korean Baptist Church, who officiated at Lee's memorial service, said in an interview Wednesday.

"How can this happen?" Lee asked. "I mean, this is Columbia. Quiet, peaceful college town. This doesn't happen here. Right?"

Not usually. But there has been a violent start to the year in Columbia, home to three colleges, where boosters promote consistent rankings atop lists of most livable places.

Aside from Im's slaying, two Columbia police officers were wounded, one critically, this week during separate confrontations with the same gunman, who later fatally shot himself in a residential neighborhood. The facts of that case are clearer, but that's not so in the slaying of Im, who joined the University of Missouri-Columbia as a research professor in 1987 after teaching and research positions at schools including Harvard, Boston University, Ohio State and Cornell.

"We have a safe campus, but we are still not immune from potential crimes," Weimer said. "This of course causes us to re-evaluate procedures and safety and talk to people on campus to reassure them."

Authorities were alerted to the lunch-hour car fire by a call from an emergency phone in a garage stairwell. The person reporting the fire isn't a suspect, Weimer said.

Once the fire was put out - most of the vehicle was undamaged - Im's body was found in the trunk. An autopsy revealed the stab wounds, and university police called in the Mid-Missouri Major Case Squad, an investigative body with personnel drawn from several law enforcement agencies.

There were no security cameras in the part of the garage where Im customarily parked, but detectives have studied video from campus cameras nearby, Weimer said.

Investigators want to question a man who was seen in the garage, a "person of interest," not necessarily a suspect.

The man is between 6 feet and 6-foot-2, with a thin build. He wore "some type of painter's mask or drywall mask," and had the hood of a sweatshirt or jacket pulled over his head, Weimer said. The person is believed to have been carrying a gas can.

Survivors include Im's wife of more than 30 years and adult twin daughters. His memorial service Tuesday at a local funeral home, spoken in English and Korean, was full of mourners "all asking why and having no answers," said Kim Wise, a professor emeritus who worked on research teams with Im for more than a decade.

"Everybody in the community is just baffled by this event. It doesn't make any sense. Certainly, nothing we worked on academically was so sensitive or mysterious that it would lead to violence," Wise said. "And to contemplate random acts of violence - well, we are all so unsettled about it."
http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansas...l/10628417.htm



http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/38629

The sudden and suspicious deaths of 11 of the world's leading microbiologists.

Who they were:

1. Nov. 12, 2001:

Benito Que was said to have been beaten in a Miami parking lot and died later.

2. Nov. 16, 2001:

Don C. Wiley went missing. Was found Dec. 20. Investigators said he got dizzy on a Memphis bridge and fell to his death in a river.

3. Nov. 21, 2001:

Vladimir Pasechnik, former high-level Russian microbiologist who defected in 1989 to the U.K. apparently died from a stroke.

4. Dec. 10, 2001:

Robert M. Schwartz was stabbed to death in Leesberg, Va. Three Satanists have been arrested.

5. Dec. 14, 2001:

Nguyen Van Set died in an airlock filled with nitrogen in his lab in Geelong, Australia.

6. Feb. 9, 2002:

Victor Korshunov had his head bashed in near his home in Moscow.

7. Feb. 14, 2002:

Ian Langford was found partially naked and wedged under a chair in Norwich, England.

8. 9. Feb. 28, 2002:

San Francisco resident Tanya Holzmayer was killed by a microbiologist colleague, Guyang Huang, who shot her as she took delivery of a pizza and then apparently shot himself.

10. March 24, 2002:

David Wynn-Williams died in a road accident near his home in Cambridge, England.

11. March 25, 2002:

Steven Mostow of the Colorado Health Sciences Centre, killed in a plane he was flying near Denver.