Tennessee college professor Ashleigh McKinzie found dead beside loaded gun — as armed man waited nearby

A college professor was found dead in a roadway near her home in Tennessee last week, with her own loaded gun beside her as an armed man waited nearby for police to arrive.

Ashleigh McKinzie, a 41-year-old sociology professor at Middle Tennessee State University, sustained multiple gunshot wounds before her body was recovered lying on a highway near her home in Smithville, Tenn., in the early morning hours of Dec. 4, according to the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office.

Officers with the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office found McKinzie’s loaded and cocked gun beside her body.

Todd Stanton, 27, was waiting at the scene with his gun placed on the hood of his truck, District Attorney Bryant Dunaway wrote on Facebook.

The exact connection between McKinzie and Stanton is unclear and investigators have not released a possible narrative as to how the distinguished educator ended up gunned down in the middle of the highway.

No arrests have been made and Stanton is cooperating with authorities, WZTV reported.

With no answers, McKinzie’s students are trying to grapple with her sudden, and grisly, demise while reflecting on the impact of her teachings.

This fall semester, McKinzie taught “Violence in the Family” in the university’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology. Her students said that McKinzie was a resident expert in darker topics like sexual assault and domestic violence, but always found a way to engage her students.

“I still, every once in a while, stumble across that paper and I read it because I remember actually having fun in her class writing it, learning about it, studying it, meeting with her about it. Most college students hate papers. But Dr. McKenzie actually made me enjoy it,” Sierra Cruz, a senior at MTSU, told the student paper The Sidelines.

“She was such a fierce advocate for nonviolence. For her to go in such a violent way is just so striking for all of us. Like, what could have happened?” Olivia Kilpatrick, a senior in the course, told WZTV.

Kilpatrick described the last thing she recalled McKinzie telling her students during their class last week.

“I remember her saying, ‘If you have a gut feeling, trust it. That’s your intuition talking, and you have it for a reason’. Thinking that she said that right before she was gone, it’s definitely something that’s going to stick with me forever,” she said.

McKinzie earned degrees from four different academic institutions, including her PhD from the University of Georgia in 2017 — just one year before joining the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at MTSU, according to her university biography.

The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation and the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office are still investigating McKinzie’s death.