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UCLA murder-suicide shooter identified as investigation continues UCLA murder-suicide shooter identified as PhD student Mainak Sarkar
(35 minutes later)
Police on Thursday identified the man they say carried out a murder-suicide that took the life of an engineering professor at UCLA. A former doctoral student with a grudge has been identified as the gunman who killed a professor before taking his own life at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The shooter was Mainak Sarkar, said officer Jenny Houser, a city police spokeswoman. Sarkar is listed on a UCLA website as a member of a computational biomechanics research group run by the victim, a professor of biomechanical engineering. The Los Angeles police department confirmed on Thursday that Mainak Sarkar, 38, shot his mentor William Klug, 39, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering.
The shooting on Wednesday brought a huge police response and widespread fear of an active shooter among tens of thousands of people at the university. Now fear has shifted to sadness as many lament the death of a professor who worked on computer models of the human heart and who was also a doting father who coached his young son’s baseball team. Sarkar had accused the victim of stealing his computer code and giving it to another student, it emerged.
Bill Klug, a professor of mechanical engineering, was gunned down in an engineering building office on Wednesday, according to a law enforcement official with knowledge of the investigation but not authorized to publicly discuss it. The PhD student shot Klug in an office in Engineering Building 4 on Wednesday morning, then turned the gun on himself, prompting thousands of students and staff to barricade themselves in classrooms and offices across the campus.
Related: UCLA murder-suicide shooting leaves two dead on campus Sarkar, who was educated in India and had lived in Minneapolis, had not completed his thesis after a decade and had become angry, according to postings he made on social media.
Finding the gunman’s motive in killing Klug will be foremost in the investigation as it continues on Thursday. In a 10 March post on a blog called Long Dark Tunnel, since deleted, he wrote: “William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy. He made me really sick. Your enemy is my enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust.”
Classes at the University of California, Los Angeles campus resumed on Thursday for most of the school, and will do so on Monday for the engineering department, whose students and faculty were coming to grips with his loss. It continued: “My name is Mainak Sarkar. I was this guy’s PhD student. We had personal differences. He cleverly stole all my code and gave it another student. He made me really sick.”
“Bill was an absolutely wonderful man, just the nicest guy you would ever want to meet,” said a collaborator, UCLA professor Alan Garfinkel. “Devoted family man, superb mentor and teacher to so many students. He was my close colleague and friend. Our research together was to build a computer model of the heart, a 50 million variable ‘virtual heart’ that could be used to test drugs.” Colleagues and friends have paid tribute to Klug, a father of two young children, as a generous and dedicated academic.
Peter Gianusso, who headed the El Segundo Little League where Klug coached, said he “exemplified what Little League was all about: character, courage and loyalty”. The Los Angeles Times quoted a source ridiculing Sarkar’s accusations. “The idea that somebody took his ideas is absolutely psychotic.” The source said Klug bent over backwards to help the student finish his dissertation and graduate even though the quality of his work was not stellar.
“He had a special relationship with his son through baseball, was a great coach, spent countless hours on the field with the boys and girls of El Segundo Little League,” Gianusso said. “Bill was a super nice guy. He didn’t want to hurt the guy.”
The initial reports from the scene set off widespread fears of an attempted mass shooting on campus, bringing a response of hundreds of heavily armed officers who swarmed the campus. The UCLA website lists Sarkar as part of the Klug Research Group, a team of six postdoctoral and PhD students researching computational biomechanics.
Groups of officers stormed into buildings that had been locked down and cleared hallways as police helicopters hovered overhead. Sarkar had studied for his PhD since 2006, two years longer than any other researcher. In a doctoral dissertation submitted in 2013 Sarkar thanked Klug “for being my mentor”.
Advised by university text alerts to turn out the lights and lock the doors where they were, many students let friends and family know they were safe in social media posts. Some described frantic evacuation scenes, while others wrote that their doors weren’t locking and posted photos of photocopiers and foosball tables they used as barricades. Three years later he still had not graduated. Reportedly wearing black, and carrying a 9mm semi-automatic pistol, he shot the professor shortly before 10am, then shot himself, triggering a lockdown across campus, with some students using belts to secure doors. Many had been taking their final exams.
After about two hours, the city police chief, Charlie Beck, said it was a murder-suicide and declared the threat over. Two men were dead, and authorities found a gun and what might be a suicide note, he said. Hundreds of police backed by helicopters and armoured vehicles swarmed the area. By midday Charlie Beck, the LAPD chief, declared the campus safe. He told a news conference: “The method of suicide is gunshot wound. Many many questions are unanswered at this point there is evidence there that could be a suicide note.”
It was the week before final exams at UCLA, whose 43,000 students make it the largest campus in the University of California system. According to his LinkedIn page Sarkar obtained a degree in aerospace engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur before obtaining a master’s in aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford university, and later enrolling at UCLA. He had also worked as a software developer and a research assistant at the University of Texas.
Those locked down inside classrooms described a nervous calm. Some said they had to rig the doors closed with whatever was at hand because they would not lock.
Umar Rehman, 21, was in a math sciences classroom adjacent to Engineering IV, the building where the shooting took place. The buildings are connected by walkway bridges near the center of the 419-acre campus.
“We kept our eye on the door. We knew that somebody eventually could come,” he said, acknowledging the terror he felt.
The door would not lock and those in the room devised a plan to hold it closed using a belt and crowbar, and demand ID from anyone who tried to get in.
Scott Waugh, an executive vice-chancellor and provost, said the university would look into concerns about doors that would not lock.
One student who spent hours sheltering in a building did the same thing almost exactly two years ago when he was locked down in a dorm at UC Santa Barbara during a shooting rampage in the surrounding neighborhood that left six students dead and wounded 13 people.
Jeremy Peschard, 21, said it was “scary” and “eerily similar” but also that having been through the feeling of crisis before left him almost numb.
“I just felt a little bit less shocked, a little bit less taken aback by the reality of an active shooter on a college campus,” he wrote in an email.
“Because I feel like this is the day and age we’re living in, that college campus shootings have genuinely become a normalized threat, almost like a natural disaster, except this type of destruction isn’t natural. It’s just really sad.”
UCLA’s commencement ceremonies and end-of-year events will now include mourning Klug, who was a devout Christian and a regular figure in organizing campus spiritual life.
In 2012, according to the campus website, he moderated a forum that his family and friends might find useful now. Its title: “Does God Care?: Seeking the Meaning of Life in the Midst of Suffering and Death.”