The family of Prof. Thomas Meixner reached a settlement with the University of Arizona, agreeing not to forge ahead with a $9 million lawsuit against the college and the Board of Regents over the October 2022 shooting death, attorneys said Tuesday.

As part of the settlement, the family accepted a “multi-million-dollar resolution” and the UA agreed to “provide critical assistance to those most immediately impacted by Dr. Meixner’s death,” said attorneys Larry Wulkan and Greg Kuykendall in a statement. “Significantly, since the murder, the university has earmarked substantial funding designed to protect the well-being of the university.”

Meixner, 52, was the head of the Department of Hydrology and
Atmospheric Sciences at the UA and known for his work on the water
quality of desert rivers.

For months before his killing, UA
professors and staff “felt like sitting ducks” in the face of violent
threats and a stream of racist, antisemitic and homophobic messages sent
by 46-year-old Murad Can Dervish, a former student who was ejected from
campus because of his “intimidating” behavior.

Last March, the attorneys filed a notice of claim—a prelude to a
lawsuit—with the Arizona Board of Regents, arguing the UA “sacrificed
Professor Tom Meixner’s life, repeatedly ignoring the clear and present
danger of a hostile and dangerous student who openly advertised his
intent to murder.”

The claim sought $9 million over what they called “repeated acts and omissions of outrageous callousness
and disregard,” which allowed “the entirely foreseeable to unfold and
occur.”

“So often in the aftermath of school shootings, we
learn all the ways that they could and should have been prevented. That
is exactly what happened here,” said Kathleen Meixner, the wife of the slain professor, in a statement published by the law firm.

“Tom’s murder revealed missed
opportunities, even though efforts by the Hydrology and Atmospheric
Sciences department were exemplary in communicating a credible threat
and seeking help to protect the U of A community. But we must look to
the future, and with urgency, ensuring that tragedies like ours do not
happen to others,” she said.

The amount of the settlement was not disclosed by the family nor UA officials.

During a press conference last year, UA President Robert C. Robbins said
there were a series of systemic failures, including “missed
opportunities and mistakes” that ultimately led to Meixner’s killing. When asked about the lawsuit, Robbins said it would move through the Board of Regents, but called it a “positive step.”

Members of the Hydrology Department were increasingly alarmed by the gunman’s messages and behavior, and this “should have led to a series of investigative steps,” which would have uncovered signs he’d been violent with his parents and harassed a fellow student in California, wrote PAX Group.

Meixner was shot multiple times and died after walking out of a classroom. The gunman fired 11 bullets and quickly fled the scene. Dervish was apprehended hours later, in the desert west of Tucson, and has been charged with murder.

He is slated to face a jury trial in Tucson in May 2024 for Meixner’s death.

In a statement to UA employees released in March 2022, Robbins said Meixner will “never be forgotten” and thanked his family for their help. “For those failures, I accept responsibility on behalf of the university and commit — once again — to all of you and to the Meixner family that we will do all that we can to prevent another tragedy.”

“The best way to honor his legacy is to make changes, and to deepen our engagement with our work and with one another,” he said. “As a community, let us unite together and continue to pray for peace and comfort for Dr. Meixner’s wife, Kathleen, and their children, Sean and Brendan, so they may find strength as they grieve his loss and navigate their sorrow.”

In the wake of the shooting, the University of Arizona Faculty Senate said they had “no confidence” in Robbins and his administration.

Following the shooting, the UA enlisted the help of the PAX Group LLC to
independently review the weeks and months before the Oct. 5, 2022
shooting, as well as the university’s response in its aftermath. Written
by Phil Andrew, a former special agent with the FBI, the 205-page
report outlines how the UA failed to assess and respond to threats from a
former graduate student, even as he continually subjected UA faculty
and staff to “reprehensible” language and threats.

The PAX Group made 33 recommendations, which include expanding safety training to individuals and units; installing fire and safety-compliant locks on classroom doors; expanding key-less access to buildings; running criminal background checks on graduate students; and automatically registering all students, faculty, and staff to receive university alerts.

Kathleen Meixner said her family wants the UA to continue pushing ahead on the measures laid about by the PAX Group, and said the firm will seek to confirm “they remain in place.”

“The security measures adopted should make the U of A community safer and provide a model to other campuses. My family and I will continue meeting with the University of Arizona president, its police chief, and multiple other members of the University administration to make certain it upholds its commitment to make our community safer,” she said. “Together, we will Bear Down, and find our way forward with courage and love for the Wildcat community which Tom cherished.”

“The settlement is a
testament that accountability is possible in a world where our legal
system often protects institutions at the expense of providing
appropriate recompense to victims,” said Kuykendall. “I was very glad to find a creative
path around the usual way of legalistic thinking and achieve a measure
of justice for an extraordinary family who has suffered an unthinkable
tragedy.”

“No amount of money can bring Tom back,
but the settlement provides the Meixner family with economic security
following the tragedy which has upended their lives and given them a
sense of relief that the University of Arizona and state of Arizona are
taking seriously the need for effective threat assessment and management
at the collegiate level,” Wulkan said. “For that we are very honored to have been able
to help them.”

“We are pleased to reach this agreement with the Meixner family and greatly appreciate their partnership and ongoing commitment to improving safety, security and support for the University of Arizona community,” said UA officials in a statement released to faculty and staff.

“The family of Professor Thomas Meixner and the Arizona Board of Regents and University of Arizona have agreed to a resolution of the legal claims arising from Professor Meixner’s death. The agreement includes a monetary settlement for the family, and non-monetary commitments that affirm the university’s continuing support for the well-being of those most affected by these events, and that provide the family with a voice in the university’s planning and implementation of measures designed to improve the safety and security of the university community,” the UA said.

Shooting ‘shocking’ but ‘not unforseeable’

The PAX Group report relied on 79 interviews with 139 students, faculty and staff, as well as more than 1,200 documents, including emails, text messages, legal filings, emergency response plans, and other reports. The group also inspected UA facilities, including classrooms, to generate the report, Robbins said.

“While the tragedy that occurred on October 5, 2022 is shocking and disturbing, it was not unforeseeable,” wrote PAX Group noted. “Preventing violence on campus requires deep commitment to a culture of safety, awareness, training, communications and coordination.”

Despite enduring a mass shooting 20 years earlier when a nursing student killed three clinical professors before turning the gun on himself, the UA did not fully establish a team devoted to assessing threats or collecting and distributing information.

Robbins said President Peter Likins—who served as UA president from 1997 to 2006—initially set up a threat assessment team, however, the PAX Group found the UA was “not running an effective” team to assess threats in “a way that is viewed as best practices among organizations of its size and scope.”

This “ineffective process,” the PAX group wrote “led to series of decisions and actions that presented multiple opportunities for [Dervish] to continue to harass and threaten University of Arizona community members.” Further, the absence of a threat assessment “placed an undue burden” on administrative offices, including the Dean of Students, the Office of General Counsel and the Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences Department to make “risk management and law enforcement decisions to prevent violent acts.”

“This led to a decentralized and fractured approach to managing the risk, which limited coordination and communication,” wrote PAX Group.

The PAX Group was paid $250,000 for the initial investigation, Robbins said.

As early as May 2018, university officials acknowledged the limits of the team and complained it lacked senior leadership and that role was left unfilled through 2022. This informal structure meant it could not push the Pima County Attorney’s Office and the Constable’s Office into aiding the University. As a consequence, Pima County Constable George Camacho failed to serve Dervish with a court order, and the Pima County Attorney’s Office “denied two additional injunction orders, mostly due to, in their review, an insufficient cause.”

Pax Group said there were “multiple missed opportunities by University of Arizona Police Department to engage, disrupt, or arrest” Dervish before the shooting, and “there was a lack of coordination among UAPD and regional law enforcement agencies to gather information” and create a “more complete picture of the seriousness of the treat.”

A timeline created by the PAX Group showed the UAPD had “at least three key moments” when they could have stopped Dervish: when he was spotted on campus in violation of his February expulsion just hours before the shooting; when he began sending threatening emails and messages; and when he stopped in at the UAPD office to run the license plate for a gold 2000 Pontiac Montana minivan he purchased on Sept. 27, 2022.

Dervish used the Pontiac van to flee from the UA after he shot Meixner, and was intercepted by police on State Route 85, about 30 miles south of Gila Bend. He was driving southbound, and refused to pull over for 2-3 miles as police attempted to stop him “using lights and siren,” according to court records.

An officer used a “PIT maneuver,” swerving his vehicle into the minivan driven by Dervish’s to spin it out and force a crash.

In the car, he had a second weapon in his vehicle, a .25-caliber Raven Arms handgun—a type of small, cheap “Saturday night special” pistol often referred to as a “Ring of Fire” gun, with a loaded 10-round magazine and another bullet in the chamber, inside a holster stuffed inside the bag in the back of the vehicle. He also had 3 other partially-loaded magazines for the .25-caliber pistol, and a box with 31 rounds of .25 ammunition.

Dervish has been charged with first degree murder, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, and misconduct with a weapon, and three counts of endangerment. And, he’s been held without bond in Pima County since October. His attorney moved to change the venue, sending the case to Maricopa County, but in January a Pima County Superior judge rejected the motion, and Dervish will face a jury trial in Tucson this September.

“Overall, the university’s culture of moving from incident to incident, without improving the process to create a clear threat management and investigative strategy, led to missed opportunities for mitigation and intervention,” the PAX Group wrote.

“Without a common understanding of the threat posed” the university’s police force “made no contact” with Dervish, even when they knew he was home just a few miles from the UA. Further, only once did the UAPD attempt to investigate his background.

As Dervish’s threats accelerated, he attempted to purchase a firearm on the website Armslist on March 5.

During his bond hearing, prosecutors presented evidence he frightened the seller of a pistol as they negotiated over the price. Described by prosecutors as “essentially Craigslist for guns” Armslist allows gun sellers to text with buyers. As Dervish haggled over the price, he told the seller “A couple of bucks doesn’t really fucking matter at all since I’m just going to use it to kill several people and then myself,” Dervish said. The seller stopped speaking to him, and Dervish wrote several days later “just kidding”

Weeks later, Dervish threatened to shoot Meixner, texting him “You are the most disgusting piece of shit I ever met. I hope somebody blows your fucking head off.”

By August, Dervish managed to buy two handguns—at least one through a private sale. Officers later found a 9mm handgun in his vehicle “loaded with ammunition consistent with the approx(imately) 11 shell casings found at the murder scene,” accordingly to court records.

On April 15, two members of  UAPD went to the gunman’s home in “an attempt to charge” him with “two counts of misdemeanor threats and arrest him.” However, he refused to open a security door, and the UAPD detective and sergeant decided to let him sign a citation “in lieu of receiving a warrant.” While leaving the two police officers were told by a neighbor Tucson Police had a report of a “disturbance” involving him on Feb. 17.

Despite the warnings from police, he continued to message members of the hydrology department, the provost’s office, and the dean of students, with “reprehensible racist language, epithets, and what could reasonably be perceived as threats,” the Pax Group wrote in the published timeline. 

During the press conference last March, Robbins said the UA had a threat assessment team, “but I think that we missed some of the important clues about the threats that were being made, in this case as well,” he said. “We missed opportunities though to arrest him to try to intervene and mitigate any violence that he was posing to the campus,” he said.

Dervish did not have a criminal record, however, he was the subject of a 2020 order of protection in California after a fellow student at San Diego State University alleged he harassed her for nearly two years. SDSU police were actively investigating the gunman in late September and uploaded his threatening emails to two websites available to UAPD. University police knoew about his history by January 2022, however the officers did not share this information with faculty.

The man had reportedly served time behind bars in previous cases, including “pulling a knife on a pizza man” while in college in Pennsylvania years ago. In another incident, the man attempted to strangle his mother with a scarf, leaving scars on her neck, his father told the Sentinel. Another time, Dervish attacked his father with a crowbar, he said.

“He wasn’t supposed to have a gun,” the elder Dervish said. “I don’t know how he got a gun.”

Despite these failures, Robbins said last year he had “confidence in the leadership at UAPD. “In those instances where they missed the opportunity to apprehend the suspect, that is a failure. And I think that going forward, we’re going to work on what do we need to do to better follow policies and procedures around who we can arrest when we can arrest them, how we can get charges actually filed?”

“So I think that there there’s clearly a lot of room for opportunity for improvement,” Robbins said.

In May, UAPD Chief Paula Balafas was forced out, while Provost Liesl Folks was shifted to a new position. The UA later tapped Christopher Olson to lead the police department on an interim basis until December when he was appointed to the role after a “extensive national search.”