Mainak Sarkar, the Indian-American shooter who killed his former supervisor at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) on Wednesday, had shot his ex-wife dead earlier in the week, the Los Angeles Police Department said.
Sarkar killed his former wife Ashley Hasti at her Minnesota home, before driving 3,200 km to the UCLA where he killed his former professor William Klug. He had planned to kill another faculty member also, according to the police.
According to Hasti’s uncle Mark Fitzgibbons, who spoke to a TV station, she met Sarkar while both were in California. She was at Scripps College for pre-med studies. They married and he obtained a green card. “He was a nice quiet young man,” he said. “I don’t know what happened to make him do this. I am just as shocked as everyone else,” the uncle said. He said they were together for “only a couple of years”, and “had separated several years ago”.
PhD. in engineeringAn alumnus of the IIT-Kharagpur, Sarkar was awarded a Ph.D by UCLA’s engineering school in 2013. He was employed outside but on Wednesday, returned to the school, with two semi-automatic pistols, multiple rounds of ammunition, and several magazines in a backpack. The police said the guns were legally purchased. Sarkar believed that Klug had stolen a computer code that he wrote, and wanted to take revenge, said the police. “He cleverly stole all my code and gave it to another student,” Sarkar had alleged in social media posts.
Sarkar was a brilliant student, according to another professor, who knew him and Klug. Alan Garfinkel, a UCLA biology and physiology professor who worked with both on a project to create a computer model of the human heart, was also one of the three members of Sarkar’s dissertation committee. “He got a Ph.D. from UCLA,” Mr. Garfinkel told the Daily Beast. “You don’t flunk your way through that.”
He said the project that Sarkar was working on was to build a virtual heart with 50 million variables. “It’s much more complicated than the most complicated video game, in terms of complexity and computation,” said Mr. Garfinkel.
The computer code that Sarkar refers to originated as part of this project, but the allegation was baseless, said Mr. Garfinkel. All the code for the virtual heart project was pooled into one compact and the project had 12 people on it, Mr. Garfinkel said. The code didn’t belong to Sarkar or Klug. “Mainak worked on a big project and the code, all code… it all belongs to UCLA…UCLA finances your research, as they did his, and UCLA owns that code,” the Daily Beast quoted the professor as saying.
While nothing much could be traced about the family and parents of Sarkar, in the industrial town of Durgapur in West Bengal where he spent his childhood, his teachers remember him as a calm studious boy.
Teachers shockedSpeaking to The Hindu over the phone, his teacher at St. Michael’s School in Durgapur, Goutam Biswas, said: “I am in complete disbelief. I am getting calls from so many people.”
Lily Chowdhury, a Biology teacher at the same school where Mainak studied till 1994, described him as “very brilliant”.
“I knew him till his ICSE. He was reserved, not the very outgoing type. I should not say that he was an introvert. But yes, he was not the type who would go around and make friends very quickly,” she said. Sarkar passed ICSE from St. Michael’s School before clearing his plus two from Bidhan Institution in 1996. He later got an under-graduate degree in aerospace engineering from IIT-Kharagpur and then went to the U.S., where he earned a Master’s degree at Stanford University.
