Woman killed by homicidal Indian PhD scholar was his wife

WASHINGTON: Mainak Sarkar's life appears to have been a mess. Ten years in a Ph.D program with an advisor with whom he had become adversarial, a long distance relationship with a spouse who was estranged from him, and a job he couldn't hold on to. 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, A third person on his "kill list", another UCLA Professor, is said to have gotten lucky; he was off-campus that day.

Police are still putting together the full story of what caused Mainak Sarkar to go mental, but among the first discoveries that have been made is that the woman who was found shot to death in a Minnesota home was married to Sarkar but was separated from him. Authorities tracked down 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 profs and Ashley Hasti. When they rushed to Hasti's home, they found her dead from gunshots. Local authorities later confirmed that Sarkar and Hasti had married on June 14, 2011, 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 a 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 undergrad who earned a Master's at Stanford, arguably the greatest pedigree in engineering, could be considered subpar.

The LA police through believes Sarkar may have gone "mental" given all the stresses he was going through in life, including an adversarial relationship with his advisor. "Everybody tries to look for a reason for this. Well, first of all, there is no good reason for this," LAPD chief Charlie Beck a local TV station. "This is a mental issue, mental derangement, but it was tied to a dispute over intellectual property."

The only bright spot in this dark tale. Sarkar did not kill a third person or cause carnage on campus. He had the goods to do that - two semi-automatic guns and plenty of ammo. No one is yet asking where and how he procured the guns as a Ph.D student, much less why guns are so easily available in the United States.