KANSAS CITY Mo. – A man who was mumbling and carrying a knife in a building where Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon was scheduled to hold a news conference stabbed a college dean in the neck Tuesday before being subdued by witnesses.
Albert Dimmitt, the dean of instruction at Penn Valley Community College in Kansas City, was slashed in the neck. He was standing in a hallway with a group of administrators awaiting Nixon’s arrival at Penn Valley when the man walked out of a computer laboratory and stabbed him.
Dimmitt was in stable condition after having surgery at a Kansas City hospital, said Kathy Walter-Mack, a spokeswoman for the chancellor of the Metropolitan Community College system, which includes Penn Valley.
Walter-Mack declined to say if the suspect was a student at the college or if there was any interaction between him and the dean before the stabbing.
She said the college system’s top administrators, including Mark James, the presidents of its five campuses, and its board of trustees, were invited to the event.
“I can’t speculate as to what might have been going on in the suspect’s mind, but I can tell you that, as terrible as this is, we were grateful that we were able to respond immediately, and all of the information that we have so far would indicate that our employee will recover,” she said.
A witness told The Associated Press that the man appeared to be “very angry” and was holding a knife as he paced around in the computer laboratory about 9:40 a.m. in the college’s Humanities building.
