Chico State professor and his estranged wife each testify as university pushes for restraining order

Credit: Jason Halley/University Photographer/Chico State

In dramatic court testimony Friday, the estranged wife of suspended Chico State professor David Stachura detailed how he told her he bought guns and ammunition in 2020 with the intention of killing two colleagues and revealed he also told her he’d seen one of them riding a bike and said he wanted to run her down.

Often sobbing on the stand, Miranda King said Stachura broke down after a marital counseling session and told her that guns and ammunition he bought in March 2020 were not, as he has claimed, purchased because he was concerned about home protection as the Covid-19 pandemic worsened. “He sat across from me and looked me in the eye and said ‘I didn’t buy the weapons for home protection.'”

As she testified, Stachura sat next to his lawyer, glaring at King, sometimes shaking his head. The couple is in the midst of a contentious divorce and child custody battle.

Stachura has said he only dreamed of the killings, saying they were part of a nightmare he had. But King said Friday he didn’t mention a dream when they talked.

He said he bought the guns “to shoot co-workers” and himself, King said, wiping her eyes. She first revealed the threats in a declaration to a judge in 2021 when winning a restraining order against Stachura. “He was very clear in revealing details and plans,” she said Friday.

He did not, she said, name his alleged targets, biology department colleagues Emily Fleming and Kristen Gorman. But he’d railed about them for months, she said, calling them “bitches” for cooperating in a campus investigation of what King said she thought at the time was a probe of Stachura for breaking Covid protocols.

What King said she didn’t know at the time was that the investigation of her husband actually centered on a sexual affair he was found to have had with a graduate student he supervised, a violation of university policy.

Even though he didn’t name Stachura’s colleagues, “I know who he was talking about,” King said – Fleming and Gorman, both of whom were sitting in Superior Court Judge Virginia Gingery’s courtroom.

King’s testimony came on the first day of Chico State’s effort to convince Gingery to make permanent a temporary workplace violence restraining order barring Stachura from campus and keeping him away from Fleming, Gorman and two others.

EdSource reported on the sex case on Dec. 8, unleashing revelations that roiled the Chico State campus. Stachura eventually lost an appeal and agreed to a settlement that cut his pay by a third for a semester. He was later named the university’s outstanding professor for the 2020-2021 academic year and promoted to full professor with tenure.

Provost Debra Larson, who approved the settlement in the sex case, resigned, although the university then hired her as a consultant at a rate of $25,400 per month through May 31, records show.

The faculty senate demanded Stachura’s resignation. His “outstanding professor” award was rescinded.

Within days, a biology department lecturer, Betsey Tamietti, revealed that Stachura allegedly spoke to her about committing gun violence in the biology department. At a Dec. 12, campuswide meeting, Tamietti quoted Stachura as telling her, “If I wanted you guys dead, you’d be dead. I am a doer. If I do go on a shooting spree, maybe I’ll pass your office. I am not sure.”

Fleming and Gorman were key to the sex case against Stachura, telling an investigator that they heard him and the student having sex in his office and finding him and the student in his office with a futon opened to a bed and the room smelling of sex. They also said they saw the two kissing in his laboratory.

Both Deputy Attorney General Shanna McDaniel and, Stachura’s lawyer, Kasra Parsad, identified the now-former student, Kristen Rueb, during the proceedings Friday.

Under questioning from McDaniel, Stachura continued to deny having a sexual affair with Rueb when she was his student. He said he “kissed Kristen in the summer of 2021” and dodged questions about whether they are currently in a relationship. Rueb was in the court audience Friday.

Also Friday, McDaniel questioned Stachura about an email he sent to biology colleagues last year that mentioned the mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. He was complaining about an email that another biology professor, Gordon Wolfe, had sent to the department expressing concerns that Stachura was a danger to the university.

McDaniel bore down on why Stachura referred to the horrific killings. He said that Wolfe “sent an email trying to get me fired. I was being harassed. The environment being created against me could lead to something like that.” There were, he said, “threats against me.”

Wolfe, who was in the courtroom Friday, said he was not harassing or threatening Stachura. “I was trying to safeguard my colleagues in the department,” he said. McDaniel described Wolfe’s email as “expressing a grave concern for safety.”

Much of McDaniel’s examination of Stachura involved Tamietti. He described her as his friend, but after the university investigated King’s revelations of Stachura’s alleged threats in 2021, Stachura said Tamietti shunned him. 

They went for a walk to get coffee, he testified, and she asked him specific questions about the threats. It was during this walk, McDaniel said, that Stachura made threats of a mass campus shooting to Tamietti. Stachura denied making the threats.

His denial drew the attention of the judge.

Gingery interrupted his testimony to ask, “Why would Ms. Tamietti lie?”

Stachura claimed she did so because she later attempted a reconciliation of their friendship, which he rejected.

Tamietti, a named party to the restraining order case, is expected to testify when the hearing resumes next month.