UCLA gunman had kill list

UCLA gunman had 'kill list' and is linked to second slaying in Minnesota

Police respond to the UCLA campus after a shooting Wednesday.

The gunman who killed a UCLA professor before committing suicide on campus Wednesday left behind a “kill list” and is suspected in the shooting death of a woman in Minnesota, authorities said.

Mainak Sarkar, 38, a former doctoral student and Minnesota resident, left a list at his home in that state that included the names of the woman, UCLA professor William Klug and a second professor who is safe, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said Thursday. Sarkar shot Klug multiple times in a small office in UCLA Engineering Building 4 before taking his own life, authorities said.

Sarkar had accused the victim of stealing his computer code and giving it to someone else, according to police.

When detectives arrived at Klug’s office on Wednesday morning and found both bodies, they also found a note from Sarkar listing his home address in Minnesota and asking someone to “check on my cat.”

“Immediately we were highly suspicious,” Beck told The Times. “That made me uneasy about what we would find when we got to Minnesota.”

The LAPD worked with the FBI and Minnesota authorities and served a search warrant at Sarkar’s home, Beck said. Inside, they found extra ammunition and a box for one of two pistols found at UCLA, as well as the “kill list” with the three names, the chief said.

Authorities went to the woman’s home in Brooklyn Park, a Minneapolis suburb, and found her body just after midnight Thursday, police said.

It appeared she had been dead of a gunshot wound for “maybe a couple of days,” Beck said.

Beck declined to name the woman but said Sarkar was suspected in her death.

“We would physically arrest him were he still alive,” the chief said.

Sarkar drove from Minnesota to Los Angeles, according to Beck, but it was unclear how long he was in L.A. before Wednesday’s shooting. Detectives don’t think it was “more than a couple of days,” the chief said.

On Wednesday, Sarkar carried a backpack, two semiautomatic pistols and extra magazines to Klug’s fourth-floor office, where he fatally shot the professor before turning the gun on himself, Beck said.

Klug, 39, was an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering. Sarkar had accused him of stealing his computer code and giving it to someone else, according to police. A source called the gunman’s accusations “absolutely untrue.”

Klug had been the target of Sarkar’s anger on social media for months. On March 10, Sarkar called the professor a “very sick person” who could not be trusted.

“William Klug, UCLA professor is not the kind of person when you think of a professor,” Sarkar wrote. “He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy,” Sarkar wrote. “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.”

Klug, who was described by friends as a kind and caring man, worked diligently to help Sarkar finish his dissertation and graduate, even though the quality of Sarkar’s work was not stellar, one source said.

“Bill was extremely generous to this student, who was a subpar student,” the person said.

In his doctoral dissertation, submitted in 2013, Sarkar expressed gratitude to Klug for his help and support. A syllabus from 2010 lists Sarkar as one of two teaching assistant s in a mechanical and aerospace engineering course, MAE: 101: Statics and Strength of Materials. Sarkar was listed in the 2014 doctoral commencement booklet with Klug as his advisor.

It is not immediately clear, Beck said, whether Sarkar tried to find the other professor on his list. The second professor, whom Beck did not name, was not on campus at the time of the shooting. Police have been in contact with that person, who “is fine,” the chief said.

Investigators are trying to determine Sarkar’s actions in recent days, particularly his drive from Minnesota, Beck said. Police are searching for Sarkar’s car, a 2003 gray Nissan Sentra, with Minnesota license plate 720KTW.

Beck said police don’t expect the vehicle to be “any significant danger,” but officials have asked anyone who sees it to call police.

Before enrolling at UCLA, Sarkar earned a master’s degree at Stanford University following an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, according to his LinkedIn page. In the U.S., he also had a stint as a research assistant at the University of Texas and worked as a software developer.

After UCLA, Sarkar worked remotely as an engineering analyst for an Ohio-based rubber company, Endurica LLC. Will Mars, the company’s president, confirmed to The Times that Sarkar worked for Endurica until August 2014. He declined to provide more details.

On Sarkar’s LinkedIn page, however, Mars offered a more specific recommendation in a post published Aug. 1, 2014: “Mainak is a steady contributor with solid technical skills in FEA and software development. I appreciate the quality of his work, and his careful approach to new problems. He has worked for Endurica in an off-site situation requiring great trust and independence, and he has performed well under those conditions.”

Matthew Uy, who provided many “endorsements” of Sarkar on LinkedIn, said that he worked in a lab at UCLA that “collaborated” with Sarkar, then a graduate student. Uy said he had not spoken with or seen Sarkar in about five years and felt “pretty disconnected” from him in general.

On Wednesday, thousands of students and UCLA staff found themselves racing to barricade classroom doors with desks, projectors and anything else they could find after cellphones buzzed across campus with alerts of a possible shooting.

By 12:05 p.m., police confirmed that two men had been killed in an engineering building.

The campus was declared safe, and UCLA officials lifted a lockdown that had canceled classes for the day.

source: LA times