A woman found dead in a Minnesota home on Thursday and whose name appeared on a “kill list” left behind by the man who committed a murder-suicide at UCLA was married to him.
The LAPD confirmed to local TV station WCCO that the victim, Ashley Hasti, was the wife of Mainak Sarkar, the man who murdered his former engineering professor in his office on UCLA’s campus Wednesday before fatally shooting himself.
A note found at the UCLA crime scene asking officials to check on Sarkar’s cat prompted the LAPD to contact officers in Sarkar’s hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota.
When officers arrived at his residence, they found a “kill list” that named Hasti, deceased professor William Klug and another UCLA professor, who has not been identified. Upon conducting a welfare check conducted at Hasti’s home in the nearby town of Brooklyn Park, police found her dead from a gunshot wound.
Hasti was a student at the University of Minnesota’s medical school who enrolled in 2012, according to WCCO.
The shootings in both Los Angeles and Brooklyn Park are being investigated as homicides.
Pretty quick to jump to conclusions there, aren’t you? How can they so quickly rule out natural causes? Since a gun was involved, maybe it was just one of those unfortunate but unavoidable accidents.
Note to self,
be really frickin’ careful who you piss off.
Ordinarily graduate students are a joy to work with and doctoral students especially so. You get to work one-on-one with people who are generally very sharp. This isn’t universally true, and sometimes things can go wrong.
This is a case where things went badly wrong. Sometimes the student blamed the advisor for his inability to complete the degree. I saw a story on the Guardian this afternoon which said he’d turned in a dissertation in 2013. If you turn in a dissertation in 2013 and it’s still not defended in 2016 something is seriously wrong. The student either turned an indefensible piece of work, or their were other serious problems with it. Those could range from academic honesty issues to outright errors in the work to crap writing.
The Guardian story said that the student accused the professor of giving away his (the student’s) computer code, which suggests to me an academic honesty problem of some sort. We don’t usually even think about this kind of thing when mentoring doctoral students, but things do happen occasionally.
The reporting has had some inconsistencies, but the LA Times quotes the LA police chief as saying that the killer got his degree in 2013, and the Times found his name in UCLA’s 2014 doctoral commencement program.
Whatever his complaints about the professors were, his wife didn’t seem to be involved with that. This was yet another troubled male who saw some other people as the bad guys in his life and some guns as the way to handle the bad guys. What kind of a nut would come up with that notion about guns?
Right!!?? This last sentence also completely took me by surprise. Did not see that coming.