CSU's Title IX Reckoning

Chico State professor says she worries ‘all the time’ that colleague will carry out alleged threat

David Stachura

Speaking in haunting tones, her voice often breaking, a Chico State biology professor testified Thursday that she worries “all the time, all the time” that a suspended colleague who has allegedly threatened to kill her will do so.

The Superior Court testimony of Kristen Gorman marked the first time that one of the people that suspended professor David Stachura allegedly threatened for cooperating in an investigation of a sexual affair he had with a student has spoken publicly about the matter. Gorman’s testimony was part of Chico State’s efforts to obtain a permanent workplace violence restraining order against Stachura that would ban him from campus. A temporary ban has kept Stachura away from campus while the university makes its case to the court.

Gorman said she was once friends with Stachura and considered him a mentor. But that changed in 2020, she said, when he began to have sex with the student in his office and act strangely. She and Stachura were allowed into the biology department when the campus went into Covid lockdown so each could care for fish they needed to keep alive for research they were conducting separately.

But during those campus visits she also became aware that Stachura was having “sex in his office quite loudly,” she said. He was exhibiting “generally irrational behavior” and drinking heavily, Gorman said. Garbage cans were overflowing with beer cans and scraps of chicken from a nearby 7-11, the only place where food was available, she said.

Stachura walked around “in his boxers and socks.” He would often go off on rants, she said. He made an off-handed comment that he bought a gun, Gorman said. “He often said things that were bizarre and out of context,” she told the court.

Eventually, Gorman and another professor, Emily Fleming, agreed to cooperate with a campus investigation that found Stachura was having an inappropriate affair with the student. Stachura repeatedly denied the affair in earlier court testimony and in interviews with EdSource.

Gorman testified that Stachura became “angry all the time. He was yelling in his office a lot, it was very loud and angry.”

Months later, Gorman got an email. It was from a lawyer representing Stachura’s estranged wife, Gorman said. The lawyer informed her that the wife, Miranda King, was seeking a domestic violence restraining order against Stachura as part of an ongoing divorce. King said in court documents filed in 2021 that Stachura told her he’d bought guns and hollow-point ammunition with the intention of killing Gorman and Fleming.

“Given the level of hatred I was experiencing, it seemed very real,” Gorman said.

Thursday’s hearing was a continuation of proceedings that began last month before Superior Court Judge Virginia Gingery. It is scheduled to resume Friday morning.

EdSource reported on Dec. 8  about the alleged threats against Gorman and Fleming and Stachura’s sex case. Chico State had evaluated him after learning of the threats and eventually returned him to work.

Stachura lost an appeal in the sex case and agreed to a settlement that cut his pay by a third for a semester. He testified last month that the pay cut had no real effect because he was able to tap research funds to make up for the lost income. He was later named the university’s outstanding professor for the 2020-2021 academic year and promoted to full professor with tenure. The professor of the year award was rescinded in December.

Amid campus outrage over the revelations, Stachura was suspended Dec. 9.

Days later, a biology lecturer, Betsey Tamietti, said at a campuswide meeting that Stanchura had also threatened her in 2021, speaking of shooting people in the biology department and that if she was lucky he would pass by her office.

Gorman testified that she had known about that threat for more than a year when Tamietti made it public. Gorman said she lived in constant fear. She said that since Stachura was right-handed, she moved her desk to make it harder for him to barge into her office and shoot her with his right hand. “I truly believe Stachura is vulnerable to committing a shooting on campus,” she said.

Stachura has denied making the threats King and Tamietti have alleged and has sued them for libel. He has also denied having an affair with the student.

Also, Thursday, interim Chico State Police Chief Christopher Nicodemus testified that he didn’t agree with an evaluation in 2021 by the university’s Campus Violence Assessment Team that concluded that Stachura was not a threat.

“I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “There were concerns.”

Nicodemus said he believed “it’s safer to err on the side of caution” when making a threat assessment.  He added that it would have been better to have mistakenly fired Stachura than live with the aftermath of a violent event.

In December, when Stachura agreed to turn over three guns he owned to the police, Nicodemus said he was concerned that his officers “might be walking into an ambush or a suicide by cop” when they went to get the weapons. He asked for help from the Chico city police and the departments “put together a tactical plan,” he said.

“You had concerns to meet with him?” Deputy Attorney General Shanna McDaniel, who is representing the university, asked the chief. “Yes,” he said. Among the steps Nicodemus said he took was deploying “an officer out of sight with a long gun” near Stachura’s apartment to watch over the retrieval of the weapons.

Police retrieved three weapons and hundreds of rounds of ammunition from Stachura’s home without incident, Nicodemus said.

McDaniel asked Nicodemus about the hollow-point bullets Stachura had purchased.

“They’re designed to cause maximum damage,” he said. “They make a bigger hole. A person bleeds out. They expire quicker. We use them in law enforcement to stop any threat with deadly force.”

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