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Cause for the carnage

What made a respected and successful businessman gather his wife and two children in the bedroom and shoot them before he shot himself to death? Friends of neither the family nor the neighbours had an idea.

Family friends discounted the gossip that Natarajan Ramachandran was seeing another woman. There were rumours that his wife Kalpana, who at 36 was younger to him by four years, was having a fling.

A family friend, who had walked into the family only to find Ramachandran, Kalpana and their seven-year-old son dead, and 11-year-old daughter seriously injured, had no answers either. When he saw the one child walking around in a disoriented state and bleeding from the gun wound, he called the police.

The girl, in a state of shock, told the police that she thought the shooting was a bad dream, and fell asleep in the room next to the master bedroom.

People close to the family may not know what's wrong, but the Federal Bureau of Investigation has the answers.

As the daughter Rejaha succumbed to her wounds, the FBI was providing the cause for the carnage:

Ramachandran, who had bought the palatial house for about $500,000 about a year ago, was the target of a multimillion-dollar federal fraud investigation. When pressure from mounting debt crossed a threshold, he gathered his family and killed them. Ramachandran had been working for an investment firm near Washington for over two years. According to officials, he owed about $450,000 in mortgage.

The incident is reminiscent of a physician who killed his wife and child in Boston last year, having hidden his desperate financial condition from them and grown despondent about it. But unlike Ramachandran he did not kill himself. He allowed himself to be chased by the FBI across several states, and was shot to death in a police encounter in Arizona, with over 150 bullets pumped into him. He had a death wish but could not bring to shoot himself, authorities surmised...

Two days ago, FBI Special Agent John L Barrett Jr confirmed that Ramachandran was being investigated for allegedly defrauding a financial institution of several million dollars, but he declined to elaborate. A source told the media that the amount was less than $10 million but would not be more specific.

Ramachandran had been interviewed several times by FBI agents who were building a case against him, said a source close to the investigation. His wife was not aware of his financial difficulties, the source said.

Several Indian community leaders and Indian psychiatrists said people like Ramachandran keep too many things for themselves, don't seek professional help and are driven to irrational excesses.

"Many in our community are very reticent," says psychiatrist Jaishree Winter. "They hide their alcoholism, they hide their depression, they hide their financial problems. And suddenly the dam bursts -- and there are tragic consequences."

Warren R Carmichael, a Fairfax County police spokesperson, told the media that "serious financial pressures weighing on" Ramachandran "caused him to become distraught".

According to sources, Ramachandran left a note detailing his financial problems.

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