Suspect didn’t fit academic stereotype

George Zinkhan has authored or contributed to more than 100 academic articles, and at one point tried his hand at verse.

Casually dressed and behind the wheel of a pickup truck, the 57-year-old looked more like a laborer than a marketing professor who has taught at universities in Europe and the United States, according to a neighbor.

Police suspect Zinkhan is the gunman who on Saturday afternoon shot and killed his wife and two other people, and wounded two others at the Athens Community Theatre near downtown, where members of an acting company were at a luncheon.

Renee Gillick, a neighbor of Zinkhan’s in Bogart, said she rarely saw him outside of his Chesterfield Road home. He kept to himself when he was out, she said.

“We found out he was a professor today. He looked more like a landscaper or a construction worker,” she said. “We were shocked, just shocked. To me, he was a reclusive person.”

Varied professional profiles list Zinkhan as a 1974 graduate of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature. At the University of Michigan he earned a master’s degree and a doctorate.

Zinkhan did stints at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Houston before joining the UGA faculty at the Terry School of Business in 1994. He taught in the school’s Department of Marketing and Distribution and is listed as the Coca-Cola Co. Professor on the school’s Web site.

As a part-time professor of VU University Amsterdam, he was honored as an outstanding faculty member.

He edited the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science from 2003 to 2006, and also contributed to two books on commerce.

He also wrote a poem that was posted to a page of the American Marketing Association Web site:

“the dark department head is always lurking,

making the rounds with a crooked, yankee-trader smile,

full of false promise about a better time to come.”