Retired MU professor’s bizarre death has campus stunned

? Friends recall Jeong Im as smart, quiet, dignified and friendly, as eager to mentor a student as to share vegetables from his home garden, the kind of person prized in academic halls and cozy neighborhoods.

That’s why last week’s stabbing death of the 72-year-old Im, a semiretired protein chemist who studied by candlelight as a young man in Korea, has stunned the University of Missouri-Columbia.

Im’s body was found Friday afternoon in the trunk of his burning car on the third floor of a university parking garage. It was the first homicide reported at the campus since the late 1980s, said University of Missouri Police spokesman Capt. Brian Weimer.

Police have released a composite sketch of a person of interest, wearing a hood and the type of oval face mask used by painters, but there have been no arrests — and thus no answers for a baffled community.

“Everybody is shocked. This was a gentle man. He loved classical music, spoke softly and was so warm inside,” the Rev. Chang Yul Lee of Columbia’s Korean Baptist Church, who officiated at Lee’s memorial service, said in an interview Wednesday.

“How can this happen?” Lee asked. “I mean, this is Columbia. Quiet, peaceful college town. This doesn’t happen here. Right?”

Not usually. But there has been a violent start to the year in Columbia, home to three colleges, where boosters promote consistent rankings atop lists of most livable places.

Aside from Im’s slaying, two Columbia police officers were wounded, one critically, this week during separate confrontations with the same gunman, who later fatally shot himself in a residential neighborhood. The facts of that case are clearer, but that’s not so in the slaying of Im, who joined the University of Missouri-Columbia as a research professor in 1987 after teaching and research positions at schools including Harvard.