2016 UCLA shooting

On June 1, 2016, two men were killed in a murder-suicide at a School of Engineering building on the campus of University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

[4][5][6] A campus-wide alert to avoid the area was issued via UCLA's BruinAlert system at 9:49 a.m. PDT,[1] and Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers were summoned to the building shortly before 10:00 a.m.

[2][8] Shortly after the shooting, police sources told the Los Angeles Times that from the appearance of the bodies, a student may have killed a professor.

[18] The issue was previously brought up during deadly mass shootings at Virginia Tech and Sandy Hook Elementary School, where students and teachers also had to improvise to keep the doors to classrooms closed.

[20] U.S. President Barack Obama was briefed about the shooting aboard Air Force One, according to White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest.

[10] On June 3, two days after the shooting, the gunman's car was discovered by a bicyclist, parked in a residential area in Culver City, California,[21][22] located about six miles southeast of the UCLA campus.

[15] They also theorized that the gunman parked in Culver City, where he had lived at one time, and took a bus that he regularly used to get to UCLA during his attendance there.

[22] On June 8, a week after the shooting, UCLA announced the launch of a task force that would review the university's response to the incident, as well as a security analysis of the campus.

[6][8][31] Ashley Erin Hasti,[32] Sarkar's estranged wife at the time of her murder, was found dead at her Brooklyn Park, Minnesota home.

A native of Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Hasti attended North Hennepin Community College from 2003 to 2006 on a part-time basis, and also took classes there from 2011 to 2012.

[39] According to sources and his now-deactivated LinkedIn profile, Sarkar graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur in West Bengal, India, in 2000 with an undergraduate degree in aerospace engineering.

Sarkar then attended UCLA's engineering school from the fall of 2007 to the summer of 2013, graduating with a Ph.D. degree in solid mechanics.

[3][8][40][41][42][43][44] Professors at UCLA described him as a "quiet and reserved" man who would not greet them whenever he passed by, and stated that he left "little impression" in their classes.

[18] At some point after his relocation to the U.S., Sarkar briefly worked as a research assistant at the University of Texas at Arlington and as a software developer.

At one point, he called Klug a "very sick person" and accused him of stealing his computer code and giving it to another student.

[43] Sarkar was linked to another murder in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota; this victim, a woman later identified as Ashley Hasti, was found shot to death in her residence.

[8] After killing Hasti, Sarkar is believed by police to have equipped himself with two legally-purchased handguns, along with several rounds of ammunition and magazines, and driven from his home to Los Angeles to commit Klug's murder.

[22] Klug was memorialized in a tweet posted by California Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, who called him an "empathetic, brilliant teacher".

[29] On the day after the shooting, UCLA hosted a candlelight vigil, attended by hundreds, including the Mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti.