Rodger Haggitt

Rodger C. Haggitt (1942 – 28 June 2000) was an American pathologist who served as director of anatomical pathology and professor of pathology at the University of Washington Medical Center, where he was internationally regarded as one of the foremost gastrointestinal pathologists of his generation. He was shot and killed in his campus office on 28 June 2000 by a pathology resident who had been told his appointment would not be renewed, in an attack Seattle police classified as a murder–suicide. Independent investigator Daniel McEvoy, presenting his inquiry into the Jonathan Reed case on Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM on 16 March 2001, separately identified Haggitt as one of four people said to have analyzed tissue taken from the non-human intelligent being Freddie during the Jonathan Reed forest incident, and characterized his death as part of a deliberate effort to suppress the results.

Gastrointestinal pathology career

Haggitt was 57 years old at the time of his death and had joined the University of Washington faculty in 1984, after earlier posts that included Baptist Memorial Hospital in Memphis and New England Deaconess Hospital in Boston; colleagues recalled that he had begun working in pathology at the age of 16. As director of anatomical pathology at the University of Washington Medical Center he was credited with developing the standard for investigating gastroesophageal reflux disease and with creating the standard protocol for hepatic allograft biopsies used in transplant centers. In a description of his work presented at the United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology's annual meeting in March 2000, the American Society of Clinical Pathologists stated that Haggitt "has taught more practicing pathologists and has had more influence on the practice of GI pathology than any other single person" associated with the organization. A university colleague, Dr. George Martin, said of him: "Professionally, he was widely regarded all over the world for his work." He was survived by his wife and three children.

His name endures in the field through the Haggitt classification (or "Haggitt levels"), a system he and co-authors introduced in 1985 to grade the depth of invasion of adenocarcinoma in pedunculated malignant colorectal polyps across levels 0 to 4; it remains in routine clinical use. The Rodger C. Haggitt Gastrointestinal Pathology Society, together with its associated Rodger C. Haggitt Excellence in Mentorship Award and Rodger C. Haggitt Memorial Lectures, is named in his honor.

Death

On the afternoon of Wednesday, 28 June 2000, Haggitt was shot in his private office at the University of Washington Medical Center by Jian Chen, a second-year pathology resident under his supervision who had been informed that he would not be permitted to continue in the program. According to investigators, Chen — who had legally purchased a handgun after a background check — arrived for a scheduled appointment, locked the office door, and after an exchange that witnesses heard as shouting fired five shots, four of which struck Haggitt, before turning the weapon on himself. Police classified the deaths as a murder–suicide; a Seattle police captain, Randy Stegmeier, called it "a tragedy" in which "two highly educated men [are] now gone." Department members had reportedly grown alarmed by Chen, who had spoken of buying a gun and whose conduct had led some faculty to begin locking their doors; the concern had been relayed to university lawyers and police before the shooting. A later Seattle Times account reported that Chen had meticulously planned the killing, leaving prepared letters and drawing on an ancient Taoist text in what investigators interpreted as the pursuit of an "honorable death."

Role in the Jonathan Reed case

In the Jonathan Reed case, Haggitt is named as a member of the team said to have examined tissue and DNA samples recovered from the non-human intelligent being Freddie during the forest incident. Presenting his investigation on Art Bell's Coast to Coast AM on 16 March 2001, McEvoy said that around 10 April 2000 he had been given a list of four people "directly involved with the ET tissue analysis" — Harold Chacon, Reed himself, and two University of Washington figures he named as "Wessel and Haggett" — and that he had travelled to Washington and interviewed Haggitt and Michael Wessels that April about what they were preparing to test for and the timeline for results, which he said were expected that September. Earlier in the same broadcast McEvoy said he had "had the knowledge of Dr. Roger Haggett and Michael Wessel, who are two of the individuals who were on the DNA analysis team" before their deaths, and that he was "rather disturbed" to learn they had died. Reed described the figure as the institution's senior pathologist, stating in a later interview that "Dr. Haggart was the head pathologist at the University of Washington Medical School," that the two had worked in the same hospital in different departments, and that they had shared "a common interest in automobiles."

McEvoy stated that on 28 June 2000 Haggitt died in his university office, that he retained "many press clippings from the school paper and the local papers" on the death, and that it "was termed a murder-suicide, a coworker kind of a dispute that he had with a research assistant." He added that the office had afterward been "cleaned out," the computer and the reports he said were due for release that September removed in what he portrayed as a deliberate removal of evidence, and that Wessels had died "two months to the day" later, on 28 August 2000, in a hiking accident in the same mountainous region of Washington as the original encounter — timing McEvoy considered inconsistent with coincidence. Reed described the same shooting, telling Art Bell that "one was found shot to death in his office" and that "somebody had entered his office, closed and locked the door, then shot him," although in retelling he merged details of Haggitt's death with the circumstances of Wessels's fatal fall. Reed and McEvoy, in the 2001 broadcast and in the later ODISEALINK documentary series, framed the death as part of a broader pattern of government suppression of the tissue-analysis findings, a position also set out in Reed's book LINK: An Extraterrestrial Odyssey (co-authored with Robert Raith); McEvoy published his case material, including the death claims, on his website aliendestiny.com.

The core of McEvoy's on-air account — a murder–suicide arising from a dispute between Haggitt and a junior member of his own department — corresponds to the documented circumstances, in which the assailant was a pathology resident under Haggitt's supervision facing termination. The contemporaneous press coverage, however, recorded no removal of files, computers, or pending reports, and attributed the killing to the resident's impending dismissal rather than to the Reed case; the public record contains no independent confirmation that Haggitt analyzed any biological material connected to Freddie. A pro-Reed video compilation rendered his name "Dr. Roger Haggart" and asserted that he and Wessels "were both going to release the DNA analysis of the creature when both of them died under mysterious circumstances in the same week."

See also

• Michael Wessels
• Harold Chacon
• Daniel McEvoy
• Jonathan Reed forest incident
• Shooting of Jonathan Reed
• Obelisk (Jonathan Reed)

References

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