Search on for US professor after three shot dead

Each victim was shot multiple times, according to the county coroner.

Holeman also said Zinkhan had his son and daughter with him when he went to the theatre, but left them in the Jeep when the shooting occurred.

SWAT members, guns drawn, later swarmed Zinkhan's tidy middle-class suburb about seven miles from the campus and searched his two-story colonial house. They also searched his office at the university, which had issued a campus-wide alert immediately following the shooting as a precaution.

The university was advising students "to use your best judgement in taking precautions while this suspect remains at large."

When Zinkhan dropped his children off, he told his neighbour, Robert Covington, that he needed someone to watch them for about an hour because of an emergency.

Covington said when he asked Zinkhan's daughter about the emergency, "all she would relate to me was there was something about a firecracker."

Zinkhan and Bruce were still living together with their children, Covington said.

Zinkhan, who has a doctorate from the University of Michigan, is a professor at UGA's Terry College of Business and had no disciplinary problems, university spokesman Pete Konenkamp said. Before joining the school in the 1990s, he held academic positions at the universities of Houston and Pittsburgh.

"His track record is impeccable as far as his teaching credentials," Konenkamp said. "He's a respected professor on campus."

Bruce, a family law attorney who specialised in divorce cases, had been a member of Town & Gown Players for several years and currently served as the group's president.

Tanner was set to play Dr. John Watson in the "Sherlock Holmes" play, which was cancelled. Teague - whose wife, Fran Teague, was a longtime professor at the university - had also been a longtime member of the group, describing himself on his Web site as "a confirmed theatre bum."

Shane Clayton, a Town & Gown member, said the group was in shock, describing Bruce as "very outgoing, very high-spirited" and Tanner as a wonderful person.

Athens attorney Ed Tolley said he and Bruce, who graduated from the University of Georgia's law school, worked on cases together.

"She was a wonderful person," Tolley said, "Redheaded, very attractive, very professional, and a wonderful mother."

Dana Adams, who lives across the street from Zinkhan, said she didn't know the family well, but described the professor as "kind of a strange character" who would sometimes walk off in the middle of a conversation.

"But I would never suspect this," she said.

AP