Los Angeles, June 4 (Reuters): A car found near Los Angeles yesterday belonged to former graduate student Mainak Sarkar who shot dead his estranged wife at her Minnesota home before driving halfway across the country and killing a professor and himself at the University of California, Los Angeles, a police spokeswoman said.
Mainak's 2003 grey Nissan Sentra was found in Culver City, a suburb just outside Los Angeles. A bomb squad has been sent to examine the vehicle, said Los Angeles police police spokeswoman Liliana Preciado.
The car was found blocks from an apartment where Sarkar once lived.
Police do not know yet how Mainak travelled to UCLA after he left his car in Culver City, about 10km away from UCLA, said Los Angeles police spokesman Drake Madison.
Investigators have been looking for the car since Wednesday, when Mainak shot dead 39-year-old engineering professor William Klug at UCLA.
The shooting drew a massive response of heavily armed police and sparked a two-hour lockdown of UCLA's sprawling urban campus. Students said they hid in classrooms behind doors, some of which did not lock.
Mainak had also intended to kill a second professor at UCLA, police said. He was convinced that Klug had stolen software he had developed, according to the police.
Earlier, Mainak had killed his estranged wife Ashley Hasti, at her home in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, police said. Hasti's sister, Alex, described her in a statement on Facebook as a 31-year-old medical school student with a love of acting and comedy.
So far no motive has emerged to explain why Mainak killed Hasti in the home they had shared in Brooklyn Park, 3,200km from Los Angeles.
Hasti was found dead early on Thursday morning of multiple gunshot wounds, the Hennepin County Medical Examiner's Office said in a statement yesterday.
"Because this was an unwitnessed death, a more accurate date and time of death cannot be determined," the statement said.
Sarkar is believed to have forced his way into Hasti's home through a window, which was found broken, Brooklyn Park police said in a statement.
The police only decided to check on Hasti after finding a note at the Los Angeles crime scene written by Mainak, 38, asking authorities to check on his cat at his home in St Paul.
The bizarre hint led to the discovery of a "kill list" that included Klug, Hasti and the second professor, Los Angeles police chief Charlie Beck told reporters on Thursday.
Alex Hasti on her Facebook post offered no indication of what might have provoked Sarkar.
"My sister, Ashley Hasti, was the smartest, coolest, and funniest person I knew. She could do anything she dreamed of," the sister said.
"Unfortunately, she won't get to see that last dream come true as her life was cut short much too soon by her estranged husband ... I'm still in a state of shock right now."
Mainak was armed with twin 9mm semi-automatic handguns and multiple extra clips of ammunition, authorities said.
The two guns were legally bought in Minnesota, according to Meredith Davis, a spokeswoman for the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. She declined to say who bought the weapons.
Wednesday's attack was the latest in a long string of deadly shootings at US schools, including an October attack at an Oregon community college that killed nine and a 2007 massacre at Virginia Tech, in which a gunman killed 32 people, was the deadliest mass shooting in US history.
Ashley Hasti married Sarkar in 2011, according to a copy of a marriage licence obtained by Reuters. An active Facebook page belonging to Hasti shows pictures of Sarkar, none more recent than May 2011.
A page apparently belonging to Mainak, with no public posts since 2011, prominently displayed several photos of them together.