Sarkar then killed engineering professor William S. Klug on Wednesday in a small office in the engineering building at UCLA.
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Johnson says Hasti was in medical school at the University of Minnesota and expected to graduate in spring.
A note at the murder scene led police to a house in a Minneapolis suburb where they found a body they later identified as Ashley Erin Hasti, Sarkar’s wife, who had been shot and killed days before the UCLA attack.
A vehicle belonging to UCLA shooter Mainak Sarkar has been found parked in Culver City today, police said.
A bomb squad that inspected the vehicle found no explosives but, the police said a handgun and cans of gasoline were in the trunk.
In a blog post uploaded on March 10 under his name, Sarkar wrote that the professor “stole all my code and gave it another student”.
The investigation into a murder-suicide on the UCLA campus took a more sinister turn Thursday when police announced they suspected the shooter earlier killed a woman in Minnesota then drove to Los Angeles to confront a professor he believed had stolen his work.
UCLA murder-suicide gunman Mainak Sarkar’s auto was found Friday in Culver City and police cordoned off the area surrounding the vehicle, the bomb squad conducted a search and Friday afternoon rush-hour traffic backed up on nearby roadways.
Sarkar believed that UCLA had released information that was harmful to him, an allegation Beck says, “UCLA says this is absolutely not true”.
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. Sarkar had a “kill list” with multiple names that in.
A woman on the “kill list” was found dead in her home outside Saint Paul, and authorities say it appears she was killed before the UCLA shooting.
“He had two semi-automatic pistols”, Chief Beck said.
Klug was a former professor of Sarkar who graduated from UCLA in 2013. He was not on the campus on Wednesday when the shooting took place.
Los Angeles police Chief Charlie Beck comments on the investigation into a murder-suicide on the UCLA campus during a news conference in Los Angeles Thursday, June 2, 2016.
Some Indian researchers in the United States said they were “discomfited” that Sarkar, who was an IIT Kharagpur graduate, could commit such a heinous crime.
“Two different notes. Two different locations”, Beck said.
A candlelight vigil at UCLA, held Thursday night, brought out more than a thousand mourners from Southern California, including Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti and UCLA Chancellor Gene Block.
According to Klug’s online biography, he earned a bachelor’s degree from Westmont College in 1998, a master’s at UCLA in 1999 and a doctorate from Caltech in 2003.
“We’re trying to look at a trigger event but we haven’t been able to find any”, he said.
“Bill was so much more than my soul mate”, his wife, Mary Elise Klug, said in a statement.
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The wife of a UCLA professor gunned down in his campus office says she’ll miss him every day for the rest of her life. She later traveled to India, China and other countries.
