US: Campus mourns professor slain by Saudi student

One after another, students and faculty members at Binghamton University trickled out of a classroom lab that had been converted, for convenience and tragic necessity, into a grieving room for the day, writes Michael S Schmidt for The New York Times. On 4 December Professor Richard T Antoun, an expert in Middle East studies, was killed in his office by a Saudi postgraduate student who repeatedly stabbed him, according to authorities.

Last Monday, the first full day of classes since the killing, Antoun's office was locked and the light was off; a single lavender-colored flower was at the foot of the door. Inside the office, things looked remarkably normal. There were stacks of books and papers, and a sketch of Iraq drawn on a chalkboard.

Meanwhile, a clearer picture began to emerge of the mind-set of the suspect, Abdulsalam S al-Zahrani, in the hours and days before the killing. According to classmates and a professor, he was distressed about not getting financial aid, and was trying to figure out how to finance his dissertation fieldwork in Detroit. Antoun served on a dissertation committee overseeing Zahrani, and while the suspect had never suggested to his roommates that he was angry at the professor, he was clearly agitated about his status in the anthropology department.
Full report on The New York Times site