Why Did a UCLA Professor Become a Target of His Enraged Advisee?

Three years ago, William S. Klug helped a struggling doctoral student revise his dissertation, recover from a shaky oral exam, and successfully defend his Ph.D. The student thanked Mr. Klug for being his mentor and headed to Minnesota to begin a career in industry.

Last week, after killing his estranged wife, the former student, Mainak Sarkar, climbed into his 2003 Nissan Sentra, drove nearly 2,000 miles back to the University of California at Los Angeles, and gunned down his mentor, according to the police. Then he turned the gun on himself.

The inexplicable and horrifying tragedy left Mr. Klug’s colleagues and students reeling and grieving. It also shattered the sense of security of thousands of students who huddled on Wednesday for two and a half hours under desks and created makeshift barriers when their cellphones buzzed with alerts of an active shooter on the campus.

On Thursday night, and again on Friday, more than 1,000 students, faculty members, and staff gathered to pay tribute to a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering whom they described as brilliant and kind, a devoted father of two young children, and a mentor his colleagues tried to emulate.

The only clue to the killing came in a cryptic rant in March that Mr. Sarkar, 38, posted on a blog that has since been removed. In it, he accused his former professor of stealing his computer code and giving it to another student. He called Mr. Klug “a very sick person” who couldn’t be trusted.

Why that complaint emerged now, three years after Mr. Sarkar walked away with a Ph.D., is unclear.

And why did he turn on the professor who had stood up for him when other members of his dissertation committee saw little in Mr. Sarkar’s work to salvage?

Alan Garfinkel, a professor of integrative biology and physiology who worked with Mr. Klug to develop a computer-generated virtual heart, is angry and tired of trying to make sense of it all. He’d rather talk about the life-saving work that Mr. Klug, 39, was leading with a team of faculty members and graduate students when his own life was cut short.

On his computer screen, a blue image of a virtual heart, which Mr. Garfinkel describes as the most anatomically correct model of the heart to date, is being used to test the efficacy of drugs to prevent ventricular fibrillation. This condition causes sudden cardiac death and kills 300,000 people a year in the United States alone, says Mr. Garfinkel.

Drugs, including those that haven’t been developed yet, can be tested on the computer model without endangering the lives of human or animal test subjects. It’s remarkably precise. “We update 25 variables at each of two million grid points every tenth of a millisecond,” Mr. Garfinkel says. “That’s a lot of computations. What makes this possible was Bill’s ability to write this code and then harness it to modern supercomputing.”

‘The Work Will Take a Hit’

Mr. Garfinkel and Daniel B. Ennis, an associate professor of radiology, will continue to work with the graduate students whose academic lives have been tied to the project. Without Mr. Klug’s leadership, “we’ll try to carry the work forward,” says Mr. Garfinkel, “but the work will take a hit.”

During Thursday’s vigil, Mr. Ennis choked up when talking about a colleague he described as kind, gentle, and compassionate.

“We will return to classrooms and offices, and we will roll up our sleeves, and we will work hard, using our minds to do amazing things,” Mr. Ennis told the crowd. “We will pull together to improve the human condition through the mastery of what is known and the exploration of what is unknown. Bill did exactly this.”

After Mr. Ennis spoke, as darkness descended on the campus and candles flickered throughout Bruin Plaza, several of the students who have been working with him in Mr. Klug’s research group, which focuses on theoretical and computational biomechanics, hugged him, tears flowing. Afterward they stood in a somber circle while dozens of students began linking hands and forming a larger circle. One by one, students stepped into that circle to describe feelings of helplessness and confusion during a lockdown that, in some cases, interrupted final exams. Their hearts pounded, they said, as text messages from friends and relatives spread rumors that as many as four shooters were gunning down students across the campus.

They talked about the fragility of life, the importance of watching out for one another, and the privilege of having professors like Mr. Klug who cared about them as individuals.

What no one could fathom was why he, of all people, would become the target of an enraged advisee. As law-enforcement authorities pieced together details of Mr. Sarkar’s background, there were no obvious warning signs.

After graduating, in 2000, from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur, Mr. Sarkar worked as a research assistant in the University of Texas system, according to his LinkedIn profile, which has since been removed. In 2005 he earned a master’s degree in aeronautical and astronautical engineering at Stanford University. He went on to UCLA, where, according to sources who asked to remain unnamed because they didn’t want to become part of the tragic story, he struggled with depression and had trouble focusing on his work. He was quiet and rarely smiled, colleagues said.

More than anyone else, it was Mr. Klug, colleagues said, who went out of his way to help Mr. Sarkar graduate.

Mr. Klug served as the adviser for Mr. Sarkar’s dissertation, “Coupled Cardiac Electrophysiology and Contraction Using Finite Element,” which was finally published in 2013. In it, Mr. Sarkar thanked Mr. Klug “for being my mentor.”

A Gifted Mentor

Mentoring students was one of his great strengths, according to Jeff D. Eldredge, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who met Mr. Klug in 1999, when they were fellow graduate students at the California Institute of Technology. Mr. Eldredge, who was a few years ahead of Mr. Klug, was his teaching assistant, softball teammate, and friend. They started work at UCLA on the same day in 2003.

“We’ve been connected ever since then, feeling our way through being junior faculty together, learning to write proposals, and developing our teaching styles,” Mr. Eldredge said in an interview on Friday. “His office was right next door to mine, and he was the voice of reason I regularly turned to. I had looked forward to us growing into old, grouchy professors together.”

Like Mr. Garfinkel, Mr. Eldredge served on Mr. Sarkar’s thesis committee.

“He was a mediocre student, stubborn about doing more work on his thesis,” said Mr. Eldredge. “Bill regularly vented to me about how much trouble he was having getting something tangible and worthwhile out of his work — something that could be publishable.”

The oral exam didn’t go well, Mr. Eldredge said. Mr. Klug was the one who had to deliver extensive suggestions for improvement, which were done “in a gentle way that only Bill could do.”

It was Mr. Klug, Mr. Garfinkel agreed, who insisted on giving Mr. Sarkar extra help, which included assisting him in rewriting a chapter.

After that, Mr. Sarkar and his wife, Ashley Hasti, whom he’d married in 2011, went off to start a new life in Minnesota. “His last connection with us was that he was happy,” Mr. Eldredge said. He submitted a revised thesis, which “wasn’t great” but good enough for the committee to pass.

“He had a doctorate from UCLA, which should have meant his future was golden,” Mr. Eldredge said.

In Minnesota Mr. Sarkar worked remotely as an engineering analyst for an Ohio-based rubber company, Endurica LLC, a job that ended for unknown reasons in 2014, according to news reports.

His marriage was also crumbling. He and Ms. Hasti, who was a medical student at the University of Minnesota Medical School at the time of her death, had separated at some point.

Briefing reporters on Thursday, Charlie Beck, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, described the killing as stemming from a dispute over intellectual property, but he said that mental illness also played a role. (His office did not return a call asking for details about the chief’s assertion, to reporters, that the gunman was “mentally deranged,” and no information was immediately available about whether Mr. Sarkar had received treatment while at UCLA.)

When the police arrived at Mr. Klug’s fourth-floor office in a UCLA engineering building on Wednesday, they found Mr. Sarkar’s note, which included instructions to check on his cat, as well as a reference to a second UCLA professor he felt had wronged him. The police got a warrant to search Mr. Sarkar’s home, in St. Paul, Minn., where they discovered a “kill list” that included the names of Mr. Klug, the second UCLA professor, and Ms. Hasti. According to the police chief, Mr. Sarkar killed Ms. Hasti, who lived in a suburb of Minneapolis, then drove to Los Angeles, arriving a few days before Mr. Klug’s killing. Mr. Sarkar was armed with two semiautomatic pistols, multiple magazines, and extra ammunition.

“He went there to kill two faculty members at UCLA,” the police chief said. “He was only able to find one.” The other, whom officials declined to identify, was off campus.

Both professors knew the killer had issues with them, but they had no idea he might be plotting to kill them, Mr. Beck said.

As for the shooter’s claim that his former professor had stolen his code, “this was a making of his own imagination,” Mr. Beck said.

If anyone owns the code that researchers working in Mr. Klug’s lab pooled, it’s the university, several professors said. Sometimes, a dozen or more people contribute to a project, with each piece building on the previous parts.

When a student writes a research code, the intellectual property belongs to UCLA, and the entire research group can use and build on it, Mr. Eldredge said. That code may become the seed for a future student to work on, and that might lead to a paper. In some research projects, it could also lead to a patent, although Mr. Klug’s group wasn’t pursuing one for its work, Mr. Eldredge said.

There’s no evidence that, in the years since Mr. Sarkar left UCLA, another student published a paper based on work that Mr. Sarkar had performed. If that had happened, it might have explained the killer’s belated obsession with claiming credit for his work.

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UCLA officials declined to comment on the controversy over the code, citing the continuing police investigation.

Because his work crossed so many disciplinary boundaries, Mr. Klug was mourned by colleagues across the campus. Linda L. Demer, a professor of medicine and physiology, described Mr. Klug as soft-spoken, kind-hearted, happy, and relaxed. The two collaborated with graduate students for more than a year on a project that looked into whether calcium mineral deposits increase or decrease the likelihood of heart attacks.

“I remember how he would explain and discuss complex concepts, such as finite element analysis, in a way that made it easy to understand,” she wrote in an email.

“The students who were involved in the research project respected him and were comfortable around him,” Ms. Demer wrote. “He treated them like equal partners in the challenge of investigation.”

Amit Singh, a doctoral student of Mr. Klug’s in engineering, described his adviser during a campus vigil as patient and humble, someone who once told him a big part of his job was helping others learn and grow.

“It’s very tragic to think that I can no longer just walk into his office and ask, ‘Boss, do you have time to help me out with this?’”

Fernanda Zamudio-Suaréz contributed to this report.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.