Nov. 15: An Indian American CEO of a Silicon Valley firm was shot dead yesterday by an engineer whom the semiconductor company had laid off hours earlier, police said.

Sid Agrawal, 57, was killed at his SiPort Inc office in Santa Clara, northern California, along with vice-president of operations Brian Pugh and an unidentified woman.

Alleged killer Jing Hua Wu, 47, who is believed to have used a handgun, then drove off in a silver SUV, probably a rented Mercury Mariner, the Mercury News daily reported.

The website of SiPort — a four-year-old firm that Mercury News described as “a relatively small company that specialises in developing digital radio semiconductors” — says Agrawal had over 25 years of experience at start-up and leading technology companies, including Adobe, Intel and Bell Labs.

He graduated in electrical engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1974, did his master’s from Southern Illinois University and earned an MBA from the University of Chicago.

The triple murder comes at a time the economic crisis has led to tens of thousands of jobs being cut in the US, and on a day Sun Microsystems announced one of the biggest tech layoffs — of 5,000 to 6,000 workers.

The police received a call at 3.53pm on Friday (early Saturday morning in India) reporting multiple gunshots in the complex, officer Mike Sellers said. “We heard somebody screaming around 4 ’clock,” said Annie Yang, employee of another firm in the complex, according to SFGate.com.

An hour after the shooting, Agrawal’s wife told a Mercury News reporter she had not yet heard from her husband and was worried that he wasn’t picking up his cellphone. The family could not be reached after his identity was released.

IIT Kanpur is planning a meeting of the 1974 batch on January 3-5 next year and Agrawal had wanted to be there. “He would have been with his friends soon but a gunman has snatched him,” said Kripa Shankar, the institute’s deputy director.

The police have broadcast the number of the getaway SUV and launched a hunt for Wu, laid off as SiPort’s lead product test engineer on Thursday evening or Friday morning, Sellers said. Some reports suggested he had headed for an airport.

Reports said Wu had a wife and two children, was 5-foot-11, weighed 77kg and had black eyes and black hair.

A fifth of all violent crime in the US occurs in the workplace, where 500 people are killed a year. But technology hub Silicon Valley has been relatively crime-free, with Santa Clara recording just two murders earlier this year.

According to networking site linkedin.com, Agrawal had earlier been CEO at semiconductor firms Zambeel and Santel Networks between 1999 and 2004, and vice-president (sales & marketing) at Synaptics in 1992-96.

Mercury News said SiPort raised at least $20 million in venture capital last year.