Navarro-Velez, 39, was an accounting professor who held a Ph.D. McMahill said his condition had been “downgraded to life-threatening” from critical. The wounded man, a 38-year-old visiting professor, was still hospitalized Thursday. In a letter to students and staff, Whitfield said that the shooting “was the most difficult day in the history of our university.” Whitfield said the name of the third victim will be released after relatives have been notified of the death. Whitfield identified two of the victims who were killed as business school professors Patricia Navarro-Velez and Cha Jan “Jerry” Chang. If police hadn’t killed the attacker, “it could have been countless additional lives taken,” he said. It wasn’t immediately clear how many of the school’s 30,000 students were on campus at the time, but McMahill said students had been gathered outside the building and the student union to eat and play games. McMahill said the shooter brought 11 magazines with him to the campus, and police found nine of them on the shooter after he was killed.

But the sheriff said that due to the sheer amount of ammunition in the gunman’s possession, he believed Polito may have been headed to the student union, which is next to the business school, when university police officers found him and he was killed in the shootout. Police were still investigating how many rounds were fired during the attack. The suspect’s weapon, a 9 mm handgun, was purchased legally last year, McMahill said. The sheriff said the rampage ended around 11:55 a.m., when Polito left the business school and was confronted by police outside the building. The first reports of gunfire came about 15 minutes later, McMahill said. He exited his car, placed items in his waistband and then entered the business school just after 11:30 a.m. Polito arrived at UNLV about 15 minutes before the shooting in a 2007 Lexus, McMahill said.

Terrified students and professors cowered in classrooms and offices as the gunman roamed the top three floors of UNLV’s five-story Lee Business School around lunchtime Wednesday. Some envelopes contained an unknown white powder that was later found to be harmless, police said.

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