OSU janitor kills supervisor and himself

March 10, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Associated Press

COLUMBUS

An Ohio State University janitor who was about to lose his job walked into a maintenance building for his early-morning shift Tuesday and shot two supervisors, killing one of them and fatally shooting himself. No students were hurt.

Nathaniel Brown, 51, arrived for work at the nation’s largest university dressed in dark clothing, a hooded sweat shirt and a backpack. He then opened fire in an office suite using two handguns, campus Police Chief Paul Denton said.

Brown spent five years in prison in the 1970s and ’80s for receiving stolen property but lied about it on his job application, records show. It wasn’t immediately clear whether Ohio State had done the required background check on him.

Ohio State released documents from Brown’s personnel file showing that supervisors complained he was tardy, slept on the job and had problems following instructions. The university sent him a letter March 2 informing him that his employment was to end Saturday.

About a half-dozen other employees were in the building when the shooting began, Denton said.

The shooting was reported at 3:30 a.m. Tuesday. Police tactical units surrounded the building and found Brown with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a garage bay, Denton said. He was pronounced dead at a campus hospital several hours later.

Brown had been scheduled to work his normal third shift, Denton said.

One of the victims, building-services manager Larry Wallington, 48, died at the scene. The other, operations shift leader Henry Butler, 60, was in stable condition at Ohio State University Medical Center, officials said.

Butler wrote a letter Feb. 11 recommending that Brown be terminated, according to records released by the university. Even though colleagues had made a special effort to help Brown, he was not improving, the letter said.