“And she made a terrible mistake in acting on that fear,’’ he said. “But it’s my view once she found that she was in a dilemma that her total intent was to disarm that weapon . . . The fact that she was in that house for that long and the robbery I think was never taken into account.’’
Judith Bishop, her mother, testified that Amy Bishop and her brother, Seth, then 18, were putting away groceries in the kitchen when Amy entered with a rifle and asked for help unloading it. She said that as Seth reached for the weapon, it discharged although Amy did not have her hand on the trigger.
“The blood was just - it just came in a wave,’’ Judith Bishop said. “My shoes were full of blood; my hair was full of blood.’’
Though the Bishops have previously issued statements through their lawyer proclaiming their daughter’s innocence in the 1986 shooting, which had been ruled an accident at the time, they had never spoken publicly. The inquest led to the indictment in June 2010 of Amy Bishop for the killing of her brother.
It is a case that may never come to trial.
Bishop was arrested in February 2010 after allegedly fatally shooting three colleagues during a faculty meeting at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where she was a professor of biology. Prosecutors have said that they intend to seek the death penalty in that case.
As law enforcement and reporters dug into her background, the shooting death of her brother and the handling of the initial investigation came under scrutiny. The revelations prompted then-Norfolk District Attorney William R. Keating, now a congressman, to seek the inquest.
During the inquest, Samuel Bishop also testified that he and his children had a disagreement the morning of the shooting over chores, though he could not remember the specifics.
