University of Maryland writing instructor charged with killing her husband
Above: Joanna Findlay (Photo courtesy of St. Mary’s County Sheriff)
A University of Maryland writing instructor, who also taught at University of Maryland Baltimore County, has been charged with second-degree murder for killing her husband, according to WBALTV.com.
Joanna Findlay, 40, allegedly shot her husband, Gary Alan Trogdon, 55, in a domestic dispute at their home in Hollywood, MD on Saturday night.
Before she was arrested, Findlay taught two English classes at the University of Maryland-College Park, according to the school’s website: ENGL398C: Writing Case Studies and Narratives and ENGL393: Technical Writing in the Professional Writing Program. She has also taught at UMBC, according to ratemyprofessors.com.
Findlay often spoke about gun control and other gun-related issues to her students, according to some students quoted in The Diamondback, College Park’s student newspaper.
A University of Maryland junior, Alex Wahlberg, told Diamondback that Findlay was one of her favorite teachers and that “A class period didn’t go by that she didn’t talk about gun laws or the number of guns she has. . . She would talk about how her house was a well-armored home. She owns tons of them. The last class we had with her, we had a huge discussion about where we stood on gun control laws. It’s really upsetting to us, but everything kind of makes sense.”
An anonymous student who had Findlay as a teacher wrote a June 2010 review of Findlay on www.ratemyprofessors.com saying: “she is a once in a lifetime professor. she is really cool and if you are a good writer, you will definitely succeed in her class. I loved her class, she was great.”
Findlay is from Scotland where she attended Aberdeen University, according to her University of Maryland bio, and moved to the United States after participating in an exchange program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She was also a published author of short stories and a book reviewer, and was working on a novel “about growing up in a small Scottish mining village,” according to the bio.
Findlay’s classes have been cancelled this week, a spokesman from the school told WBALTV, and she is being held without bail.