Los Angeles police confirmed Thursday that the shooter in the University of California Los Angeles attack had planned to kill another professor but was not able to locate the faculty member, who was off campus at the time of the attack.
Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck said at a press conference that the dead suspect, Mainak Sarkar, left a suicide note in the office of William Klug after he fatally shot the engineering professor and then killed himself.
The note asked someone to check in on his cat in his Minnesota home. Detectives followed the note’s instructions to Sarkar’s residence in St. Paul, where they also discovered a “kill list.”
The 38-year-old former engineering graduate student had planned to kill two UCLA professors and a woman in Minnesota.
The note led investigators to a dead woman’s body outside St. Paul they believe was the individual named on that list. Sarkar is believed to have killed the woman before driving across the country to California with two guns and ammunition to carry out the two other planned shootings.
Sarkar had appeared to be on good terms with the engineering professor he fatally shot Wednesday. In a 2013 dissertation, Sarkar wrote, “I would like to thank my adviser, Dr. William Klug, for all his help and support. Thank you for being my mentor.”
But that relationship apparently took a turn for the worse in the years since Sarkar finished his master’s program. According to a blog post written in March by a person who claimed to be Sarkar, he said Klug had shared his intellectual property and stolen codes he had come up with.
“He cleverly stole all my code and gave it [to] another student,” the post states. “He made me really sick.”
The writer continued: “Your enemy is your enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust. Stay away from this sick guy.”
Sarkar was a member of a computational biomechanics research group that Klug had overseen, according to the UCLA website.
Police are still looking for the car Sarkar used to drive from Minnesota to California.
Classes for most students resumed Thursday, but the engineering department will not go back to a normal schedule until Monday.
