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U.C.L.A. Gunman Had ‘Kill List,’ Police Say; New Body Found U.C.L.A. Gunman Had ‘Kill List,’ Police Say; New Body Found
(about 7 hours later)
The gunman who killed a U.C.L.A. professor and then took his own life on Wednesday left a list of people he apparently intended to kill, the Los Angeles police chief said on Thursday. A second victim on that list has been found dead in Minnesota. LOS ANGELES — Before he fatally shot a U.C.L.A. professor he had studied under, a gunman apparently killed a woman near his home in Minnesota, then drove to California planning to gun down two professors, but found only one of them, law enforcement officials said Thursday.
The chief, Charlie Beck, said that the gunman, Mainak Sarkar, a former graduate student at U.C.L.A., had left a note at the scene where he killed Prof. William S. Klug, asking someone to check on his cat at his home in Minnesota. The gunman, identified as Mainak Sarkar, killed Prof. William S. Klug on Wednesday morning, then took his own life, leaving a note asking that someone check on his cat at his apartment in St. Paul, Minn., the Los Angeles police chief, Charlie Beck, said. In that apartment, police found what they described as “a kill list,” including the names of Dr. Klug, another U.C.L.A. professor and a woman who lived in nearby Brooklyn Park, Minn.
Executing a search warrant at that residence, the police found “a note with names on it indicating a kill list,” Chief Beck said in an interview with KTLA, a Los Angeles television station. Los Angeles officials alerted the police in Brooklyn Park shortly after midnight, and officers who went to the address found “an adult female who was deceased of an apparent gunshot wound,” said Mark Bruley, deputy police chief of Brooklyn Park. Officials in both cities declined to give the woman’s name or describe her relationship with Mr. Sarkar.
“Professor Klug was on that list, as was another U.C.L.A. professor, who is all right, and whose name I’m not going to give out at this point, but also the name of a female,” he said. “And so we did a follow-up investigation to that female’s residence in a nearby town in Minnesota and found her deceased by gunshot wound.” People who knew her identified her as Ashley Hasti,a medical student and former girlfriend of Mr. Sarkar’s; public records show that for a time, they had both lived at her address in Brooklyn Park, a modest split-level beige house on a quiet, tree-shaded street. Ms. Hasti studied Asian languages and literature at the University of Minnesota, and later enrolled in medical school there. “She was just ever so interested in everything,” her grandmother, Jean Johnson, said. “That girl was so smart that you just couldn’t get ahead of her.”
Chief Beck said the second professor was not on campus Wednesday when Mr. Sarkar arrived. When Ms. Johnson was hospitalized in March, she said Ms. Hasti called after pulling a double shift to question her about the care she was receiving and gauge whether it met her own standards.
He also declined to identify the woman, or say what connection she had to Mr. Sarkar, but he said there was evidence linking him to the killing. “The connection is very strong,” he said. Ms. Hasti met Mr. Sarkar about five years ago, after she went to California to take pre-medicine courses, and her family later spent some time with him, Ms. Johnson recalled. She remembered some jarring moments, like Mr. Sarkar saying that his family had a history of violence, and falsely disparaging Ms. Hasti’s academic integrity. But they broke up more than a year ago, she said, and her granddaughter never indicated that she feared him.
Mr. Sarkar, 38, earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from U.C.L.A. in 2013, the university confirmed. On Wednesday, the police say, he went to the fourth-floor office of Professor Klug, 39, in a building called Engineering IV and opened fire. Early Thursday morning, Ms. Johnson said she got a call from Ms. Hasti’s other grandmother, who broke the news.
On March 10, in a blog post that has since been deleted, Mr. Sarkar called the professor “a sick person” who stole his work. “She just screamed at me, `Ashley’s dead,’ ” Ms. Johnson said. “I just about had a heart attack right there.”
The murder-suicide at the University of California, Los Angeles, was the latest in a long string of campus shootings, but the fact that professors were specifically targeted heightened what some faculty members said is a growing fear of violence, prompting many to think about the experiences they have had that might have angered students, especially those who seemed psychologically fragile.
New laws in Texas and other states allowing people to carry concealed weapons on college campuses have heightened concerns about gun violence, though concealed carry is still prohibited on most campuses around the country, including those in California. Two prominent faculty members have left the University of Texas at Austin, citing the change, and a third has said he will try to defy the law, barring guns in his classroom.
“You never want to have to think about something like this, and now I’m not sure I can avoid thinking about it,” said Joshua Dienstag, a political-science professor who spent two and a half hours on Wednesday barricaded in a room with four others while U.C.L.A. was on lockdown.
Mr. Sarkar, 38, who immigrated from India, earned a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from U.C.L.A. in 2013. On March 10, in a blog post that has since been deleted, Mr. Sarkar called Dr. Klug, 39, “a sick person.”
“I was this guy’s Ph.D. student,” he wrote. “We had personal differences. He cleverly stole all my code and gave it another student. He made me really sick.”“I was this guy’s Ph.D. student,” he wrote. “We had personal differences. He cleverly stole all my code and gave it another student. He made me really sick.”
Asked about a motive, Chief Beck said: “This is some mental issues, mental derangement, but it was tied to a dispute over intellectual property where Sarkar felt that he had had information released by the professor that harmed him. U.C.L.A. says this is absolutely not true, that this is the workings of his imagination.” Chief Beck said at a news conference that investigators think the claim was unfounded, and that Mr. Sarkar had “some mental issues.”
Chief Beck said he did not know of any explicit threats Mr. Sarkar had made, in social media or elsewhere. Professors at U.C.L.A. “had some reservations about his conduct,” he said, but “I don’t think they thought he was a deadly threat.” On Wednesday, Mr. Sarkar walked into the Engineering IV building, entered the fourth-floor office of Dr. Klug, and opened fire. The professor, a husband and father of two small children, was considered a star in computational biomechanics, a field that applies engineering principles to biology and medicine.
Mr. Sarkar was armed on Wednesday with two semiautomatic pistols and multiple magazines, the chief said. “He could have done much more damage with the ordnance he brought to U.C.L.A.,” he said, “so there’s small comfort in that.” Dr. Klug was a devoted youth baseball coach. His research dealt with topics as esoteric as the mechanical structures of the protein shells around viruses, and of layers of fatty molecules in cell membranes.
The police asked for the public’s help in finding the car Mr. Sarkar drove from Minnesota to California, which they hoped would yield more evidence. It is a gray 2003 Nissan Sentra with Minnesota license plates 720 KTW. The note Mr. Sarkar left in the office talked about a grievance against the other professor on his list, Chief Beck said, adding, “Detectives believe, and I support their belief, that he went there intending to kill two faculty members from U.C.L.A.”
The other professor was off-campus at the time, he said, and it is not clear if Mr. Sarkar tried to find him. Professors had known of Mr. Sarkar’s grudge against some of the faculty, he added, but they did not think he posed a threat. Court records in Minnesota indicate that Mr. Sarkar’s only run-ins with the law were minor traffic and parking tickets.
He took two semiautomatic pistols with him to U.C.L.A. — both legally purchased in Minnesota, officials said — along with multiple magazines, but fired just three shots from one weapon. “He could have caused many more fatalities,” Chief Beck said.
As students and faculty here tried to resume classes and prepare for finals, some professors said that campus shootings have subtly transformed the educational experience, making them more cautious. David Myers, a former chairman of the History Department who has offered active shooter training, said that when he met with students who seem enraged or unstable, he found himself watching their hands, ever more cognizant of the possibility that they might be armed.
“I sort of lived in fear of this day coming to my own campus,” Dr. Myers said. “And it did. It did.” Ideally, a university “is a place of free movement of ideas and people,” he said. “When that is constrained in the way it was yesterday, something is killed off.”
Stephen Aron, who succeeded Mr. Myers as chairman of the History Department, said he had become quicker to refer troubled students to counselors, rather than trying to discuss their problems. Digital communication makes it harder to tell how students really are, he added, because, “It’s harder to parse out tone in an email than face-to-face.”
“People are feeling a bit discombobulated today,” he said. “I’m hearing that mostly from my staff. They’re the ones there every day, so in some sense they’re most vulnerable in those situations. It’s not surprising they feel particularly scared.”