Slaying of University of Arizona professor leaves void

Michael Bogan and Thomas Meixner spent many hours together on the banks of the Santa Cruz River in Tucson. They both studied water at the University of Arizona and would take trips down to the river to conduct research. They were colleagues, yes, but they were also longtime friends.

“When I took the job here, Tom was the first person to reach out to me and welcome me to campus,” said Bogan, who is an assistant professor in the School of Natural Resources and the Environment. “He was always generous with his time and energy to help people around him. He always had a smile on and had an infectious laugh.”

But on Wednesday afternoon, Bogan was out at the river without him. Meixner was back on campus working through the midweek grind in his role as head of the Hydrology & Atmospheric Sciences Department, which is housed in the J.W. Harshbarger Building on the UA’s main campus.

A little after 2 p.m. Bogan, who hadn’t been checking his phone while working on the river, received several texts from friends asking if he was OK. Confused, Bogan got online and read about how an unidentified person had been shot at the Harshbarger Building.

“As soon as I learned what building it was, I texted Tom,” Bogan recalled Thursday morning. “When I didn’t hear back, I thought maybe as the department head he was helping take care of the people around him.” That wasn’t too hard to imagine. Helping people in need was the kind of person Meixner was to his core, Bogan said, describing him as a rare combination of “funny, witty, warm and generous.”

As afternoon faded into evening, an unseasonably late rainstorm gathered over Tucson, and Bogan still hadn’t heard from Meixner.

“It started pouring at 5:45,” he said. “As soon as that happened, I thought: ‘That’s Tom. This is a storm he would have loved.’”

About 10 minutes later, Bogan got the confirmation: A former student who was barred from entering the hydrology building, Murad Dervish, had reportedly shot and killed Meixner. Police apprehended Dervish later that evening outside of Gila Bend.

Meixner’s killing, Bogan said, “leaves a huge void” at the UA and the greater Tucson community.

Saving ‘the world’s most precious resource’

Known among his colleagues as a prolific researcher with a passion for water conservation, Meixner, who was 52, earned his doctorate in hydrology and water resources from the UA in 1999, and joined the faculty in 2005. He became department head in 2019.

As a hydrologist, Meixner worked on several projects related to water conservation and sustainability, including helping to improve the stormwater infrastructure, as well as investigating the Colorado River shortages and over-pumping of regional aquifers. According to his colleagues, he also saw the importance of studying water through a social justice lens, researching the potential impacts of the proposed Rosemont Mine and how groundwater pumping for border wall construction could affect desert springs.

In his personal life, Meixner was an active member of his church, St. Cyril of Alexandria Roman Catholic Parish, and devoted family man.

“He was a great man, a deeply faith-filled and devoted husband and father. He was passionate about hydrology, and one of the last acts he performed on this earth was to teach a class,” Meixner’s family wrote in a statement. “He described his work as ‘making the world better through biogeochemistry,’ but to us, he was trying to save the world’s most precious resource.”

‘The dad’

Ty Ferré, a distinguished professor in the hydrology department, first met Meixner when they were both in grad school at the UA in the 1990s. Years later, they both came back to work in the same department.

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“He was a leading researcher, but that was never his most important thing. He always put people first,” said Ferré, who lauded his late friend’s personable and effective leadership skills as a department head. Despite rising to the top of his career by his early 50s, Meixner never took himself too seriously.

“We taught field school together, and we’d have all the students outside. Tom would sing Bruce Springstein loud and terribly,” Ferré remembered with a tempered chuckle. “Students referred to him as ‘the dad.’ They always knew he was there if they needed or wanted him, but also knew he wouldn’t sugar-coat things.”

While Meixner was a steady mentor for so many students, he also knew what it was like to face hardship himself. He was diagnosed with leukemia, a disease he beat back once during graduate school and again in more recent years.

Brittany Ciancarelli, a program manager and academic advisor in the hydrology department, said she will never forget how her boss, Meixner, treated her with empathy and compassion when she experienced a recurrence of colon cancer last year. He immediately told her to work from home and rest whenever she needed to — whatever she had to do to get through her treatments.

“I felt so grateful for that because that’s not the case for everyone going through treatment. Some people just have to buck up and go to work, and I could take it easier because he allowed me to,” Ciancarelli said. “I don’t know if I would have gotten through it without him and his compassion.”

Brilliant, but humble

In addition to creating a warm and lively department culture, Meixner also valued academic collaboration, constantly involving professors from other departments in interdisciplinary research projects.

Courtney Crosson, an associate professor of architecture whose research focuses on water, said she had known Meixner for several years and appreciated his support of her career. The two had just received a grant from the National Science Foundation to be co-principal investigators on a project. But instead of focusing on that Thursday morning, she brought a bouquet of flowers to lay on the makeshift memorial sitting in front of the Harshbarger Building.

“He was so well-respected from across all different departments,” said Crosson, who also left a handwritten sign describing Meixner as talented, brilliant and hardworking at his memorial. “He was an amazing example to everyone around him. He was a full professor and department head, but still willing to be humble and willing to be present for everyone. He was a fantastic example of a human being and a great mentor for faculty and students.”

‘Could have been’ anyone

Heidi Harley, a professor of linguistics at the UA, was also sitting outside the Harshbarger Building on Thursday afternoon, holding a sign calling for a ban on firearms. Harley said she did not personally know Meixner, but wanted to both help memorialize him and call attention to the gun violence that killed Meixner and thousands of other Americans this year alone.

In 2020, which is the most recent data available, 45,222 Americans died in a gun-related incident, according to the Pew Research Center.

And Meixner’s killing is not the first time a UA faculty member has died by gun violence perpetrated by a student. In 2002, a troubled student killed three professors in the College of Nursing before taking his own life.

“There’s no law that says that if you are in the grip of strong emotion you shouldn’t have a gun,” said Harley, who devoted the first few minutes of her class Thursday morning to talking about Meixner’s life. “In the context of the greater spectrum of gun violence in this country, (Meixner’s slaying) is a smaller event. But it strikes me personally, and I just can’t stand it.”

While Harley decided not to cancel her classes Thursday, several other professors did, which may have contributed to the eerily quiet tone near the crime scene. But in other areas, like the Student Union Memorial Center, students were operating as usual — cramming for tests, eating lunch and chatting with friends.

“It’s a little unnerving, the fact that someone on campus wanted to kill their professor for some reason. That could have happened to any of my professors,” said Manny Ries, a sophomore pre-business major who was camped out with his laptop near the union Thursday afternoon. “But at the same time, that’s the world we live in. There’s so much unrest, and a lot of school shootings lately.”

Ries, who did not know Meixner, said none of his professors canceled classes and none of them mentioned the professor’s killing.

“We just carried on with the class like nothing happened. It’s lingering, though,” Ries said. “Even though I wasn’t at the scene and wasn’t involved, I know that could have easily been one of my professors, me or another student.”