JP Morgan Chase executive Aditya Tomar killed in New York train crash

Tomar was an alum of IIT Roorkee.

By The American Bazaar Staff

NEW YORK: IIT Roorkee alum Aditya Tomar, 41, a JPMorgan Chase & Co. vice president for technology, supporting the bank’s asset-management team, was among the six people killed in the February 3 horrific commuter Metro-North Railroad train accident in New York’s Westchester County.

Tomar and his wife, Reshma Persaud, residents of Danbury, Connecticut, had no children, the Danbury News-Times reported, citing his mother-in-law, Dee Persaud.

“He was kind, loving, fun and very smart,” Dee Persaud was quoted as saying. “We are all very sad.”

Mina Patel, a friend of the deceased, said the cuople were known in the community for their helpful nature.

“Everybody has their dream when they come to America,” Patel said. “They were living theirs.”

The accident on Tuesday evening was the worst ever for the beleaguered Metro-North which has a piling number of accidents to its record. The accident happened when the train Tomar and four other victims were riding collided with a sport-utility vehicle stopped on the tracks, at Valhalla, NY. The collision killed the driver of the SUV, Ellen Brody, and caused a fire that left five passengers dead, all riding in the front car of the train. The train driver survived, but is still in hospital.

“Aditya was an extraordinary colleague,” JPMorgan said in a statement, on Tomar’s demise, reported Bloomberg. “His leadership skills, sense of humor and tireless team spirit contributed to a better workplace for all of us in JPMorgan Asset Management.”

A second JPMorgan executive, Joseph Nadol, a 42-year-old managing director and analyst for the aerospace and defense industries, also was a passenger killed in the accident.

“Our thoughts and prayers go out to their families, and to the many employees who worked with these colleagues and knew them well,” Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan chief executive officer, and John Donnelly, the bank’s head of human resources, said today in a separate statement. “It is a terrible tragedy and loss.”

The Journal News reported Tomar’s colleague and friend Santhosh Kumar saying he considered Tomar a mentor, and described him in superlatives: smart, talented, dedicated, hardworking and generous with his time.

“He’s one of the people, if they called me at three in the morning, I’d do anything for him,” said Kumar. “That’s the kind of thing he’d do for me.”

Outside work, Kumar said Tomar was proud of his Indian heritage and loved his wife, Reshma, and his house, a white colonial that sits on a hill near Danbury High School in Connecticut.

“He loved his wife more than anything else,” Kumar said.

Eric Vandercar, a senior managing director in institutional sales and trading at Mesirow Financial in New York, was a third financial industry executive killed aboard the train, reported Bloomberg.

Robert Dirks, a research scientist for the chemistry division of D.E. Shaw Research, was also killed in the crash.

Walter Liedtke, a curator of European paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, was also a victim of the crash.

Tomar was previously a vice president for Morgan Stanley capital-markets automated trading, according to a profile on LinkedIn.com. He also worked as a vice president at New York-based Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. and for Barclays Capital, supporting electronic and algorithmic rates trading, Bloomberg reported. He attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and the India Institute of Technology in Roorkee, according to the LinkedIn page. He started his career at Con Edison, where he worked in commodity pricing.

The Daily Mail reported on Friday that Tomar’s family had hope that he had survived after being told at the hospital where he was admitted after the crash on Tuesday that he was “fine”, and learnt of his death only on Wednesday night.

Tomar’s mother-in-law Dee Persaud spoke with the New York Daily News, revealing that Tomar had been texting back and forth with both his wife and brother-in-law Renaldo just minutes before the crash.

‘At 5:45pm he told her, “I’m on the train and I’ll be home soon,'”‘ she said.

But then – around 6:20pm – communication went quiet and his wife started to worry when he didn’t get home by his usual time of 7pm. Reshma texted her husband asking ‘Where are you?’ but got no answer.

‘She thought maybe he had to stay at work late. But at 11 o’clock he still wasn’t home and she started to get worried,’ Dee said.

It was around that time that Reshma started calling the train stations and hospitals and learned that a major accident had happened in Valhalla, the Mail reported.

Reshma and her brother rushed to Westchester County Medical Center to see if Tomar was among the injured, where they received some good – but ultimately false – news.

‘Somebody there, the security, said, “He’s fine, he’s undergoing X-rays,”‘ Dee said.

The next morning, they realized that everyone at the hospital had been accounted for except Tomar, and Reshma submitted her husband’s medical records to the Medical Examiner. Later that night they finally got confirmation that he was among the deceased.