The body of Ashley Hasti, 31, was found early Thursday in her home in Brooklyn Park, northwest of Minneapolis.
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The gunman in the UCLA shooting that occurred yesterday (June 1), which left two dead, has been identified as Mainak Sarkar, the Associated Press reports.
Mainak Sarkar, the man who shot and killed a UCLA professor Wednesday before turning the gun on himself, is also believed to have climbed through a window to kill his estranged wife in her Minnesota home prior to the UCLA incident, authorities said.
Police found Hasti’s body Thursday morning – the day after the UCLA shooting – during a welfare check. Police said, “We believe he went there to kill two faculty of UCLA”, Beck said.
Beck said, however, that the shooting appeared to be “tied to a dispute over intellectual property”.
Sarkar reportedly felt the professor he killed had released information “that harmed him”, but UCLA has said that this is absolutely not true and it was the workings of his imagination.
While at UCLA, Sarkar was “a nice guy going through the same anxieties and struggles as anyone else”, recalled Jeff Eldredge, a mechanical and aerospace engineering professor who was a close friend of Klug’s and helped review and later approved Sarkar’s dissertation. “Apparently he’s harbored those feelings (against Klug) over the past three years since his graduation but we’ve not been able to determine any trigger event that would have led to this or his murder of his wife”, Los Angeles police Capt. William Hayes said.
Sarkar’s list also mentioned another professor.
Sarkar remained on a “website for Klug’s research group”.
The attack appeared to be provoked by Sarkar’s belief that Klug had stolen computer code from him, according to a March blog post by a person of the same name. “They really can’t believe it because Bill was one of the kindest, most light-hearted, quiet person that you’d ever meet”.
Beck said Sarkar drove his vehicle from Minnesota to Los Angeles to target Klug.
Beck says the note requested that the finder check on a cat at Sarkar’s residence in St. Paul, Minnesota. Investigators later described Sarkar writing up a “kill list” found at his home in Minnesota which included the names of two professors and a woman who was later found dead in Minnesota.
Police say a gun and several gas cans were recovered. Klug had refused to give him a passing grade. He killed himself immediately after fatally shooting Klug, he said.
A Nissan Sentra belonging to the gunman who opened fire in a murder-suicide at UCLA was found parked Friday in a residential area of Culver City, police said.
“Because this was an unwitnessed death, a more accurate date and time of death can not be determined”, the statement said.
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Sarkar, an Aerospace engineer from IIT Kharagpur moved to US in 2001.
