UCLA shooting: Indian gunman Mainak Sarkar called his victim ‘a sick guy’

The Los Angeles Police Department has identified the gunman who shot a professor at the campus of the University of California Los Angeles. Mainak Sarkar, an Indian doctoral student in mechanical engineering, killed his professor William Klug on Wednesday before turning the gun on himself in an incident that sent shockwaves throughout the campus. LA police chief said that the woman on the ‘kill list’ in UCLA shooter’s home was found dead in Minnesota. According to The Los Angeles Times, Sarkar had previously claimed in a blog post that Klug had stolen his code and given it to another student. The Los Angeles Times quoted from a post on Sarkar’s blog in which he called Klug a “very sick person” and warned incoming students to not interact with him as he was not trustworthy. “Stay away from this sick guy,” he wrote. Sarkar had completed his PhD under Klug in 2011. However, other university sources told The Los Angeles Times that Sarkar’s allegations were totally false. [caption id=“attachment_2813938” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Los Angeles Police officers escort people at the UCLA campus after a fatal shooting at the University of California, Los Angeles. AP[/caption] Sarkar did not attack anyone else, reported NBC Los Angeles, adding that LAPD revealed that a note had been found with the two bodies in the site of the murder-suicide: an office in the engineering building. However, they are yet to provide any details or confirm that it was a suicide note. According to Sarkar’s LinkedIn page, he graduated from IIT Kharagpur with a degree in aerospace engineering in 2000. He then got a master’s degree in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University in 2005 before completing his PhD in mechanical engineering from UCLA. Meanwhile, students and faculty at the engineering department were yet to come to grips with the loss of Klug. They lamented the death of a professor who worked on computer models of the human heart who was also a doting father who coached his young son’s baseball team. “Bill was an absolutely wonderful man, just the nicest guy you would ever want to meet,” said a collaborator, UCLA Professor Alan Garfinkel. “Devoted family man, superb mentor and teacher to so many students. He was my close colleague and friend. Our research together was to build a computer model of the heart, a 50 million variable ‘virtual heart’ that could be used to test drugs.” Peter Gianusso, who headed the El Segundo Little League where Klug coached, said he “exemplified what Little League was all about: character, courage and loyalty.” “He had a special relationship with his son through baseball, was a great coach, spent countless hours on the field with the boys and girls of El Segundo Little League,” Gianusso said. The incident prompted a campus-wide lockdown as hundreds of officers and tactical response teams as well as federal agents rushed to the university, where students are preparing for final exams. All university classes were cancelled for the day. The lockdown was lifted shortly after noon on Wednesday. Scott Waugh, the university’s vice chancellor and provost, said classes would resume as normal on Thursday and next week’s final exams would not be disrupted. He said counselling services were also being made available to the 40,000 students enrolled at the campus as well as faculty and staff. “We want to resume normal operations as quickly as possible,” Waugh said. “Faculty, staff and students should show up tomorrow and go through their regular routines and complete the quarter as planned.” Students recounted scenes of panic after the alert was raised by the university, with many barricading themselves in classrooms or hiding in dorms. “We were in the middle of class when we got (a text alert) and the professor just told us to lock the door really quickly and not to make any noise,” said Ricky, a student who did not want his last name to be used. Many students and staff could be seen walking out of buildings with their arms raised. Others knelt down on sidewalks as officers patted them down for possible weapons. A nearby elementary school and a middle school were also put on lockdown. The White House said President Barack Obama was notified of the shooting and had asked his team to keep him updated on the situation. With inputs from agencies