Mainak Sarkar murdered woman in Minnesota before killing Prof. William Klug, committing suicide

Sarkar accused Klug of stealing his computer code.

AB Wire

Former doctoral student at the University of California Los Angeles Mainak Sarkar, 38, who killed professor William Klug, 39, before committing suicide, on campus, on Wednesday, is now suspected of killing a woman in Minnesota, too.

The stunning news comes with the revelation that a “kill list” was found in Sarkar’s home, which included the woman’s name. She has been found dead in Minnesota, Los Angeles’ police chief said Thursday, reported NBC News.

LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said the same during an interview on KTLA. A second UCLA professor was on that list as well, along with Klug.

Police in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, said in a statement that officers found a woman who died of an apparent gunshot wound.

The officers found the woman while conducting a welfare check requested by the LAPD. The welfare check was related to Wednesday’s murder-suicide on the UCLA campus.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Sarkar had accused Prof. Klug of stealing his computer code and giving it to someone else, according to Los Angeles police.

Sarkar took his own life after killing Klug in a small office in UCLA Engineering Building 4, sources confirmed.

“There is no good reason for this,” Beck said.

Klug was an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and 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 should not be trusted.

“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,” 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.”

A source called the gunman’s accusations “absolutely untrue,” reported the Times.

“The idea that somebody took his ideas is absolutely psychotic,” the university source said.

Beck said that Sarkar had written two notes, one of which had a list of names that included Klug, the dead woman, and another UCLA professor. “It was a list that made the readers believe he was going to kill,” Beck said.

Sarkar had driven from Minnesota to Los Angeles with two semiautomatic handguns , and investigators were still searching for the vehicle, which the chief described as a gray Nissan Sentra with Minnesota license plates 720KTW. Beck said police don’t expect it to be “any significant danger” but asks anyone who sees it to call police.

Beck said the second professor named on the kill list has been contacted and “is fine,” but won’t reveal that person’s name. Only said that professor also taught Sarkar when he was at UCLA.

Klug, who was described by friends as a kind and caring man, bent over backward to help Sarkar finish his dissertation and graduate even though the quality of his work was not stellar, the source added.

“Bill was extremely generous to this student, who was a subpar student,” the source said. “He helped him out and interceded for him academically.”

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 assistants 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.

“Thank you for being my mentor,” he wrote in the acknowledgements.

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.

Thousands of students and UCLA staff on Wednesday 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.

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

All classes, except those in engineering, were to resume Thursday, the university said. Engineering classes will resume once authorities have completed their investigation, which could be as early as Friday.