A North Carolina Wilmington professor who is retiring amid controversy over a series of tweets was found dead at his home Thursday afternoon.
New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office agents said they are investigating the death of Mike Adams after he was discovered around 2 pm No further details have been provided.
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Adams, 55, announced his retirement in late June after a series of Twitter posts sparked outrage from the community.
Former professor of criminology at UNCW, Mike Adams.
The university said in a statement that the decision to withdraw came “in light of the public attention generated by the comments it made on its personal social media channels.”
The university sent a memo to the campus community Thursday to inform them of Adam’s death.
“It is with sadness that we share the news that the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office is conducting a death investigation involving Dr. Mike Adams, professor of criminology. Please keep your friends and loved ones in your thoughts, “the memo, obtained by Fox News, said.
The UNCW criminology professor, and author of “Feminists Say the Cursed Things: A Politically Incorrect Professor Confronts ‘Womyn’ on Campus,” was due to retire on August 1 after 27 years at school, she said. Foreign Minister José Sartarelli in a statement. .
In a tweet on May 28, Adams wrote: “Don’t close the universities. Close the non-essential majors. Just like Women’s Studies.”
On May 29, Adams tweeted, “Tonight I ate pizza and drank beer with six men at a six-seat table. I almost felt like a free man who did not live in the slave state of North Carolina. Massa Cooper, let my people go! ” He said referring to the state’s Democratic governor, Roy Cooper.
The comments came days after George Floyd’s death in Minneapolis, sparking outrage and national protests. Floyd, an unarmed black man, died in police custody after a police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes.
Adams later defended his tweets, saying they had nothing to do with race and that they were a blow to Cooper’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic and restrictive blocking measures.
Petitions to fire Adams garnered more than 25,000 signatures. At the time, he filed a complaint with the New Hanover County Sheriff’s Office, saying he received a death threat from someone he offended, according to WECT reports.
The incident was not the first time that Adams gained scrutiny due to his tweets.
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In 2016, he posted on Twitter: “Black Lives Matter supporters are racist, emotionally unstable, or suffering from a severe intellectual hernia. Or all of the above. “In a separate post that year he wrote:” When someone kills a police officer, you know that his last words were probably ‘Allahu Akbar’ or ‘Black Lives Matter’. “
He also faced backlash for calling a student a “queer Muslim.”
