LOS ANGELES — Before he fatally shot a U.C.L.A. professor he had studied under, a gunman apparently killed a woman near his home in Minnesota, then drove to California planning to gun down two professors, but found only one of them, law enforcement officials said Thursday.

The gunman, identified as Mainak Sarkar, killed Prof. William S. Klug on Wednesday morning, then took his own life, leaving a note asking that someone check on his cat at his apartment in St. Paul, Minn., the Los Angeles police chief, Charlie Beck, said. In that apartment, police found what they described as “a kill list,” including the names of Dr. Klug, another U.C.L.A. professor and a woman who lived in nearby Brooklyn Park, Minn.

Los Angeles officials alerted the police in Brooklyn Park shortly after midnight, and the officers who went to the address found “an adult female who was deceased of an apparent gunshot wound,” said Mark Bruley, deputy police chief of Brooklyn Park. Officials in both cities declined to give the woman’s name or describe her relationship with Mr. Sarkar.

People who knew her identified her as Ashley Hasti, a medical student and former girlfriend of Mr. Sarkar’s; public records show that for a time, they had both lived at her address in Brooklyn Park, a modest split-level beige house on a quiet, tree-shaded street. Ms. Hasti studied Asian languages and literature at the University of Minnesota and later enrolled in medical school there. “She was just ever so interested in everything,” her grandmother Jean Johnson said. “That girl was so smart that you just couldn’t get ahead of her.”