Yesterday’s murder-suicide at UCLA wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment, impulsive act by someone disagreeing with the tenor of a classroom discussion…as so many anti-campus carry types say their fear. The shooter, Mainak Sarkar (above), a UCLA Ph.D. grad, had planned things to the point of making a list of those he wanted kill. As CNN is reporting . . .
“Everybody tries to look for a reason for this. Well, first of all, there is no good reason for this,” Beck told KTLA. “This is a mental issue, mental derangement, but it was tied to a dispute over intellectual property.”
Sarkar felt the professor he killed had released information “that harmed him,” Beck told the station. “UCLA says this is absolutely not true. This is the workings of his imagination.”
Sarkar drove from Minnesota to LA with two handguns with the express purpose of killing professor William S. Klug, whose name was on the list.
Another individual on the list, an unidentified Minnesota woman, was found to have been shot to death apparently before Sarkar left on his murderous road trip. When Sarkar arrived at UCLA,
He went to his former professor’s fourth-floor office Wednesday and shot him dead with multiple rounds, then committed suicide, Beck said. The shooting sent the campus on lockdown for hours, leaving students shaken.
Investigators who rushed to the scene found a note, according to the police chief.
Another professor was also listed, but wasn’t harmed. We probably don’t have to tell you that UCLA is a designated gun-free zone. Not that that had any impact whatsoever on Sarkar. Nor would it affect anyone else with similar intent. It’s just fortunate for UCLA that Sarkar didn’t have a longer list and/or was more determined to check off all the names he’d accumulated.