The man who fatally shot a UCLA professor has been identified as Mainak Sarkar, a former doctoral student who drove from Minnesota to California with two semiautomatic handguns, police said Thursday.
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Authorities in Los Angeles identified the gunman in the shooting as 38-year-old Mainak Sarkar, an engineering graduate student who lived in Minnesota. “I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy”, Sarkar wrote on March 10.
Detectives believe Sarkar also meant to kill the second professor but couldn’t find him Wednesday on the bustling campus, Beck said.
A woman who lives near the home in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, where police are investigating the second death attributed to Sarkar said she was asked specifically about Hasti by investigators, per the Minneapolis Star Tribune.
Police asked for the public’s help to find the vehicle he drove to Los Angeles, a 2003 Nissan Sentra.
A law enforcement official says the Minnesota woman on the UCLA gunman’s “kill list” was Ashley Hasti, and documents show they were married.
He entered the UCLA campus, went to Klug’s fourth floor office and shot his former professor dead with multiple rounds, Beck said. Another UCLA professor was also listed, but that person is reportedly safe. “The belief is based on the evidence that he committed that murder, probably a day or so ago, and then drove out to the Los Angeles area to carry out this threat against professor Klug and presumably others”, Neiman said.
UCLA, in the Westwood section of Los Angeles, has more than 40,000 students.
“William, Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person you think of a professor”, Sarkar wrote.
He was a member of Klug’s research group, and even thanked him in his dissertation, citing Klug as “my mentor”. “He made me really sick”.
Hasti’s grandmother, Jean Johnson, said the two only remained together for about a year, but didn’t get a divorce because Hasti couldn’t afford one. “But your friend can do a lot more harm”, the post said. “The thoughts and prayers of our entire UCLA family are with the victims’ families and the students, faculty and staff of UCLA Engineering”, Chancellor Gene Block announced in an email. “Be careful about who you trust”.
“Bill (Klug) was extremely generous to this student, who was a subpar student”, the Times quoted a source as saying.
“Immediately, we were highly suspicious”, Beck said, reports the L.A. Times.
Classes resumed Thursday. It is unclear if the Engineering 4 building is accessible.
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Klug, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, specialized in biomechanics, including the workings of the human heart, according to UCLA’s website.
