Woman on UCLA shooter's 'kill list' found dead in Minnesota

WASHINGTON: Mainak Sarkar’s life appears to have been a mess before he ended it. Ten years in a PhD program with an advisor with whom he had become adversarial, a long-distance struggle with a spouse who was estranged from him, and jobs in Texas and Ohio that he couldn’t hold on to as he strove to complete his doctoral work. What could have been the mental state of a pedigreed doctoral candidate (IIT bachelor’s and Stanford master’s), when he killed his wife in Minnesota and then drove 2500 kms to Los Angeles and shot dead his advisor at UCLA Investigators are still putting together the full story of what caused Mainak Sarkar to go ''mental,'' but among the first discoveries they have made is that the woman who was found shot to death in a Minnesota home was once married to Sarkar but was separated from him. Police broke into the home of Ashley Hasti when they found a note on Sarkar after his murder-suicide of Ph.D advisor William Klug in which he had asked those who found his body to take care of his cat left behind in a Minnesota apartment.When police went there, they found a ''kill list'' with three names on it- two UCLA professors including Klug and Ashley Hasti. (The second UCLA Professor, whose name authorities did not release, escaped death because he was off-campus the day Sarkar came looking). When they rushed to Hasti’s home in Minnesota, they found her dead from gunshots inflicted 24-48 hours before.Local authorities later confirmed that Sarkar and Hasti had wed on June 14, 2011 at a Minnesota court house, but the marriage reportedly lasted only a year and they were separated at the time of her death. They lived in separate homes and their social media photos together went back several months.Hasti’s family has asked for privacy at this time but it appears the couple, who met in California in 2010 when Hasti was doing an undergrad course in a college there, could not make it work. While Sarkar was struggling to complete his PhD program at UCLA, Hasti returned to her home state and was enrolled in the University of Minnesota Medical School since 2012.Sarkar appears to have moved back and forth between the two states, considering he maintained a home in Minnesota and also worked remotely as an engineering analyst for an Ohio-based rubber company Endurica till 2014. The company did not say under what circumstances he left, but a testimonial from the company’s President on Sarkar’s Linked-in page read, in part: ''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.''While Sarkar railed against his Ph.D advisor William Klug in blog posts for stealing his code and giving it to others, one of Klug’s friends was quoted as saying Sarkar was a ''subpar'' student, and the advisor was ''extremely generous to him.'' But in exchanges online, some Indians belonging to the ''more-to-this-than-meets-the-eye school'' have wondered how an IIT-Stanford alum, arguably one of the best pedigrees in engineering, could be considered subpar.Authorities though believe Sarkar may have gone ''mental'' given all the stress he was going through in life, including an adversarial equation with an advisor who was only a year older than him, and a broken marriage. ''Everybody tries to look for a reason. Well, first of all, there is no good reason for this,'' LAPD chief Charlie Beck told a local TV station. ''This is a mental issue, mental derangement, but it was tied to a dispute over intellectual property.''The only relief in this dark tale: Sarkar could not kill the second professor or cause more carnage on campus. He had the goods to do that- two semi-automatic guns and plenty of ammo.No is yet asking where and how he procured the guns as a Ph.D student with permanent residency, much less why guns continue to be easily available in the United States.