Cops: Student Fatally Stabbed USC Professor

Police believe killing was personal dispute
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Dec 3, 2016 7:50 AM CST
Cops: Student Fatally Stabbed USC Professor
Police say it wasn't the student or the professor that called the LAPD.   (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

A student stabbed a psychology professor to death on the University of Southern California campus in Los Angeles on Friday in what authorities say was a personal dispute. An LAPD spokeswoman says the professor was killed inside the Seeley G. Mudd building in the heart of campus, the AP reports. She says a male student was arrested without incident immediately after police arrived at the scene of the attack. USC President CL Max Nikias identified the professor killed as Bosco Tjan. Tjan joined USC in 2001, taught in the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, and served as co-director of the Dornsife Cognitive Neuroimaging Center, Nikias said in a letter to the USC community.

"As the Trojan family mourns Professor Tjan's untimely passing, we will keep his family in our thoughts," Nikias said. The USC Department of Public Safety said in a statement that investigators believe the attack was not random and "was the result of a personal dispute." Chris Purington, project manager at Tjan's lab, said he never heard of anyone having a problem with Tjan—a married father of one son listed in public records as 50 years old—and had no idea who would have wanted him dead. "He was somebody who really cared about people. I know he cared about me," Purington says. "He mentored people and he looked out for them. He spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to be a mentor and guide people." (In June, a UCLA engineering professor and a student died in a murder-suicide .)

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