COLUMBUS – Ohio State University says the ex-employee who killed himself inside a gallery at the campus’ contemporary art museum was a security guard who resigned in 2009 to avoid being fired.
“We can confirm the deceased, 63-year-old Dean D. Sturgis, to be a former Department of Public Safety security officer who resigned in lieu of termination in 2009,” Vernon Baisden, Director of Public Safety, said in a statement Monday.
The school says he had worked as an unarmed security guard, but no other details about his employment were released.
Gunshots can be heard in the 911 call describing the rampage that ended in the Sturgis’s death.
A security supervisor at the Wexner Center for the Arts called 911 and told a city police dispatcher that a man was “marking up the art and shooting.”
The caller was then transferred to university police where he told a dispatcher a short time later that the man had shot himself in the head.
No one else was injured in the shooting, which was reported at 11:20 a.m. Sunday, shortly after the museum was scheduled to open for the day.
Wexner Center officials are still assessing the damage to artwork vandalized by Sturgis before he shot himself.