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Editor's note: This is the second of a two-part story on Gary Wise, a former UT professor who is in jail facing deadly conduct charges. The information in these articles comes from interviews with Wise's friends, students and former colleagues, and from documents provided to the Texan.
Gary Wise, once a well-liked engineering professor, is in jail. Police say he threatened former bosses and fired gunshots at their houses. While he waits for a day in court, The Daily Texan examines his story in two parts.
In the 1:30 a.m. darkness, he parked a Toyota Camry on Glengarry Drive. He stepped out of the car, then turned around and began to backtrack toward a house he'd already passed.
He darted his head back and forth, checking the shadows to make sure the coast was clear. He had an excuse ready: walking alone at night was "peaceful," he told the police who stopped him later. He was just "getting exercise"; he carried a Buck folding knife in his right pants pocket in case he was jumped.
By coincidence, on his peaceful walk, Gary Wise had approached the house of his old boss: Engineering Dean Ben Streetman.
Maybe Streetman would be outside. Maybe they would meet in the night, and Wise could do or say what he intended in an e-mail one month before: "... maybe some night Streetman will find himself off campus in front of me. Guess what's going to happen if he does."
But it didn't happen. The police were parked out front, and Wise stopped and began to walk away. They were waiting for him. Streetman had asked the UT Police Department to watch his house, because he thought it was Wise who spray painted "SOB" on his car and mailbox earlier that week.
Wise told the officers they could search his car. They'd find nothing but papers in it, he said, and "Oh yes, one can of spray paint." He said he'd been painting some bookshelves in his apartment. By coincidence, the spray paint was navy blue, the same color found on Streetman's car and mailbox.
Wise, who was "Broadway Gary" to some friends and "Dr. Counterexample" to others, was walking deeper into his own paranoia. A stroke in 1992 had wrecked his motor skills and broken his lucidity. Though he had been well-liked, the professor had alienated colleagues and students, and had drawn the dean's ire. Now, here he was in April 2000, by the house of the man who fired him, getting released by officers with a warning.
Later that night, Streetman filed a peace bond, or yearlong restraining order, against Wise. The threats continued.
Tough lesson
It took a full semester for Fitz D. Jackson III, an engineering student, to realize there was something "unkosher" about the way Wise taught. Jackson transferred in 1998 to finish his degree at the University of Houston. He said Wise, formerly his favorite teacher, was one of the main reasons he left.
At first, Jackson thought Wise's "roundabout" way of teaching was simply a professor-specific style. In his experience, each professor had a different way of integrating the material to make it interesting.
"Dr. Wise wouldn't talk about the material directly," Jackson said. "I thought he was giving a string of indirect references when he would talk about himself and then link it to technical things so it would be easier to understand. That's one of the things I was waiting for, and it never happened."
Dean Streetman said, of Wise's lectures, "There was a lot of sex and violence involved in class."
Some students took Wise's sexual remarks in class as lighthearted humor. But to the females toward whom he directed jokes, it was hardly laughable.
Jackson, sitting in the very front row, hoped that surely, in the end, everything would make sense. But the end of the semester left a "bad taste" in his mouth, when he received a D.
Wise told him his final grade was a reflection of his final exam performance. Jackson, his father and Streetman asked to see the final exam. It was missing.
"I was expecting an A in the class, because the final was almost exactly like the midterm," Jackson said.
High grades were not uncommon in Wise's class. Students would take his class "just because they knew they would get an A," Streetman said.
E-mails, office visits, voice mail and even parental phone calls to the dean's office solidified Streetman's claim that Wise's performance was deteriorating, his teaching methods were "unorthodox" and his interaction with students was "completely unacceptable."
Faculty encounters
On Wise's office door, a sign read, "Fear me, for I have the power to destroy you." While students called for an evaluation of Wise's performance, some faculty seemed to take the sign seriously.
Small, peculiar events began to escalate into threats. Wise's good friend Professor Terry Wagner remembers accompanying Luc Devroye, one of Wise's former graduate students, to Wise's apartment.
"He wouldn't let us in," Wagner said. "He talked to us through the speaker."
Despite the surprise, Wagner and Devroye eventually coaxed Wise out.
The blows to Wagner's and Wise's friendship didn't stop there. On a hot day in July 1997, a fire alarm rang, and he, Wise and another engineering professor filed out with the students. Wise began displaying tae kwon-do, nearing Wagner's face with each strike.
"I said, 'You're really annoying me with this'," Wagner said, but Wise did not stop and eventually called Wagner a "wimp."
The same year, Wise referred to the department chairman as a "son-of-a-bitch" and "bastard" in faculty list serv e-mails. He publicly criticized Streetman, whom he called a "liar" on more than one occasion.
Those are only a few of the reported incidents. In 1999, Wise filed a grievance against Streetman, claiming the dean overstepped his authority in a way that harmfully affected Wise and the University.
Instead, Wise received further reprimands. By August 1999, Streetman and the department's new chairman, Francis Bostick, had started the process to revoke his tenure. Wise agreed to retire from the University. The arrangement became effective in January 2000, the same year he filed for divorce after a four-year separation from his wife.
Wise started leaving obscene voice messages for Streetman. Under the agreement, he couldn't enter buildings where engineering faculty had their offices. But he could make escorted visits to clean out his own office. During one such visit, Wise wrote a final e-mail to the faculty list serv.
"These clowns are turning this place into the degree mill it once was," he wrote on March 2, 2000, in the same message that included a threat to Streetman. "I am so adamant in this conviction that I am leaving."
He added, toward the end, "Streetman has convinced me that I hate it here."
Reasons
Streetman said the University would never let anyone go because of health problems. He was indignant at the suggestion that Wise's stroke could explain some of his conduct, and he denied any links between Wise's stroke and his actions.
"Wise is going to use whatever excuse he can get," he said.
He called the idea that Wise's stroke led to his criminal activities "an insult to stroke victims that overcome their paralysis and speaking difficulties and such."
"I've known people with strokes, and often there's some paralysis and physical therapy involved," Streetman said. "I don't think you can use his stroke as an excuse for behavior that happened eight years later."
But Jose Diaz, neurologist for the Memorial Hermann Health Care System in Houston, said Streetman had only mentioned the most clearly visible, and easily treated, effects of a stroke.
While many strokes do cause paralysis and a loss of motor control - the effects Streetman described - those that occur in the temporal or frontal lobes of the brain primarily affect behavior, Diaz said.
"I can see where the dean is coming from, in that everyone would focus on treating Wise's weakness and forget about his behavior," Diaz said. "The weakness would improve, and then the behavior would become a bigger part of the problem."
Changes in behavior don't always become problems if patients experience a supportive, nurturing environment, Diaz said. But a competitive academic setting could have induced paranoia.
Gunshots
A year and a half after the restraining order was filed, on Christmas Eve 2001, Wise allegedly shot eight red paintball pellets at Streetman's house. One of them broke the front glass window, leading to nearly $5,600 in property damage. Police say he also fired at UT President Larry Faulkner's house.
Six years after he left the University, police say, Wise fired what his friends hope was his last shot.
Police say Wise went on his most recent and widespread shooting spree May 20, this time targeting chairman Bostick's house in addition to Streetman's. At 3:30 a.m. Streetman's wife thought she heard gun shots at their home. The Streetmans had bought video surveillance cameras for the house, and police said some clips show the driver of a green Ford Mustang firing "two potentially deadly rounds" at Streetman's 1994 Acura.
He had upgraded from a can of blue spray paint and a paintball gun to a shotgun and a .22 caliber weapon, according to police records. The license plate on his new car said "WANDRR."
Less than 10 minutes later, Wise pulled up to Bostick's house and took another shot. This time the bullet ripped through the front door and lodged in the TV set.
He also visited his former office location, the Chemical and Petroleum Engineering Building. Early the next morning, police found two bullets near a shattered glass door. They were similar to those found in one of the CPE's exit doors earlier in the spring semester.
Wise was arrested three days later. Broadcast reports said police found 29 guns at his home. He is charged with a third-degree felony for stalking and deadly conduct, punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
He was released for 18 hours on a $25,000 bond, before police took him back into custody for further investigation. His bond now set at $75,000, he awaits a trial date.
Sympathy
After Wise was released, few professors agreed to talk to The Daily Texan about his case. Some were concerned about their safety. Others worried about their standing with the dean.
"I think the typical person feels very sorry for him, but on the other hand, you don't want to look like you're going against the dean," Wagner said.
By contrast, Streetman has been candid about his former stalker.
"If you write a sympathetic story on Gary Wise, you'd be making a big mistake," Streetman said.
Wise has been receiving media attention for his arrest, and initial reactions have added to the perceptions of Wise's character and mental health.
John Morrison, who studied under Wise in the 1980s, said that current coverage has made Wise out to be a "horrible person."
"I don't think you can assign fault to him. I think it's just beyond his control," Morrison said.
Eric Hall, a friend who co-wrote a book with Wise in 1993, spoke to him recently. The last time was before the arrest. The two had been working on writing a new probability textbook for graduate students. In an e-mail interview, Hall says Wise is "by far the most brilliant person I encountered during my seven years of graduate work at UT."
Neither Devroye nor Wagner has seen Wise for more than five years. Both say he never got the help he needed.
"Even now," Devroye said, "I believe that he should not go to jail, but rather to the hospital."
Click here for the first part of this story
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