UCLA shooter acted on his own, say cops

Mainak Sarkar, the Indian-American gunman who shot dead his wife and his former college professor before turning the gun on himself, acted on his own, the police said on Saturday.

“This was simply him,” Captain William Hayes of the Los Angels Police Department told reporters.

“We have not been able to determine any trigger event that would lead to this or the murder of his wife,” he said in response to a question.

Sarkar, 38, killed his wife Ashley Hasti at her Minnesota home, before driving to the University of California Los Angeles to shoot his former professor William Klug.

The police is still investigating into the possible motives of the shooting that has shocked the Indian-American community nationwide.

It is believed that Sarkar first killed his wife in Minneapolis after which he drove his Nissan to Los Angeles for killing Klug.

The Los Angeles Police Department’s Deputy Chief Matt Blake said investigators have found a hand gun and several red gasoline cans in the car’s trunk.

The police believes that the cans were used to refuel the tank on his way from Minneapolis to Los Angeles so as to avoid using his credit card at gas stations during his long drive.

It did not look like the cans were used “for anything nefarious”, Hayes was quoted as saying by The Los Angeles Times.

Meanwhile, the police said they were having difficulties in identifying the body of Hasti, the wife of Sarkar.

They reportedly married in 2011.

“They didn’t live together long – maybe a year,” Charlane Bertsch, Hasti’s great-aunt, told Los Angeles Times.

Hasti’s uncle, Mark Fitzgibbons, told NBC News the family was in shock. 

“She was way ahead of her time,” Fitzgibbons said of his niece, who had studied abroad in Taiwan and China during high school before heading to ScrippsCollege in California for pre-med studies.

There is no evidence that Sarkar committed any other crime.