TUCSON, ARIZ. ? A day after a nursing student shot three professors to death and killed himself, a newspaper received a 22-page list of grievances from the gunman that began, “Greetings from the dead.”

“You have received this letter after a rather horrendous event,” Robert S. Flores Jr. wrote, apparently weeks before the slayings. A student who was flunking out of school, he insisted the shootings were not about revenge.

“I guess what it is about is that it is a reckoning,” Flores wrote. “A settling of accounts. The university is filled with too many people who are filled with hubris. They feel untouchable.”

The letter ends with, “As the curtain closes I will exit the stage for a well deserved rest.”

The Arizona Daily Star said it received the letter Tuesday night. Police said Wednesday they had no reason to doubt its authenticity.

Flores, 41, shot three of his instructors at the University of Arizona nursing school to death Monday, then killed himself.

In the letter, Flores complained about two of the instructors he killed Robin Rogers and Barbara Monroe but did not refer to harming them.

His third victim, Cheryl McGaffic, was not named.

The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson received a 22-page letter from Robert S. Flores, who fatally shot three of his instructors and then committed suicide Monday at the University of Arizona School of Nursing.

The letter gives a chronology of Flores’ troubled life his failed marriage, poor health and slights from a nursing school he claimed treated male students as “tokens” and tries to explain the shootings.

“I am rational,” he writes. “I understand that I have committed homicide and that I have broken the laws of our society. I will save the taxpayers money and take care of the problem. I realize that I am depressed but even with treatment it will not change my future. People will want to know why I did this? Why the innocent lives?”

The newspaper said the letter was postmarked Monday and was accompanied by college transcripts, military evaluations, recommendations from employers and two birthday cards. It published excerpts of the letter Wednesday and posted the entire document on its Web site.

It appears Flores wrote the letter in two stages separated by several weeks, with all but the first two pages written on the eve of the killings. The letter describes him as increasingly hopeless as he faces a bleak future with financial and health problems looming.

“I am tired, tired and weary,” the letter says. “Rather than spend the next month or two selling what little I have I am going to end it now.”

¢ www.azstarnet.com