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A PhD student who shot and killed a professor before killing himself claimed that the professor had stolen his code:
The student who shot and killed his engineering professor and then himself at a Los Angeles university had accused the professor of stealing his code.
In a blog post on March 10, Mainak Sarkar, 38, said Professor William Klug, 39, "is not the kind of person when you think of a professor. He is a very sick person. I urge every new student coming to UCLA to stay away from this guy." He continued: "I was this guy's PhD student. We had personal differences. He cleverly stole all my code and gave it another student. He made me really sick. Your enemy is your enemy. But your friend can do a lot more harm. Be careful about whom you trust. Stay away from this sick guy." The post has since been taken down.
On Wednesday, nearly three months after posting it, and seemingly upset at poor grades, Sarkar drove from his home in Minnesota to Los Angeles where he confronted and gunned down Professor Klug at the university's engineering complex. Sarkar then turned the gun on himself and killed himself. The Los Angeles Times quoted an unnamed UCLA source as saying the allegation that Klug stole his student's code was "absolutely untrue."
The professor's name was found on a "kill list" written by Sarkar, along with another professor who wasn't on campus at the time of the shooting and has been confirmed to be safe. Sarkar reportedly killed his estranged wife in Minnesota before traveling to UCLA. Also at Los Angeles Times , The New York Times , CNN.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by tractatus_techno_philosophicus on Friday June 03 2016, @09:19PM
I knew a grudge collector just like this in college. He was a fellow Computer Science student and one of the biggest egomaniacs I and my friends ever knew. He couldn't handle being criticized, and was under ludicrous amounts of additional stress because he was also in the University Honors Program. He constantly retold stories of teachers who had "wronged him" in high school (and even younger), and it was clear that he had never once been able to let go of any criticism of him in his entire life up to that point. He perceived any form of criticism, even the constructive criticism of a good teacher, to be a direct assault on him. I would have felt sorry for him, had he not also been a colossal creep and an asshole to everyone around him. He collected years worth of criticisms and held on to them as grudges. Eventually, spurred by an existential crisis related to his fundamentalist-Christian view of the world, he completely lost his mind.
Where the story takes an interesting turn is via an incident which he caused in February of 2011 (we were all Juniors at the time). Apparently, all of the stress and mental anguish he had been building inside himself for years, courtesy of his inability to admit he was a normal human being like everyone else, caused him to have a mental breakdown. He went insane at the Computer Science building, running from room to room, switching the lights on and off, climbing on top of vending machines, typing on random students' laptops and sticking his feet on people. Within minutes the campus police were called, and he was strapped down in the back of an ambulance. There was never an incident like that at the Computer Science building before, and there hasn't been one since. Although a stray outlier at the time, I believe this guy is a symptom of a much bigger problem, and that more people like him are coming soon to a college campus near you.
This guy, I believe in my heart of hearts, has the potential to be a mass shooter, as he fits the psychological profiles of multiple, past mass shooters pretty well. This guy needed and still needs help, and he isn't getting it from his church, his idiot parents or anyone else. He is part of the coddled "trophy generation", of which I am also. The difference between he and I is that I know I'm flawed and constantly strive to improve myself. I've had my ass handed to me multiple times throughout my life, and it was usually due to unrealistic or completely warped expectations I had of the world. I learned from those mistakes, and changed my thinking to suit a real and unfair world. Life is tough, brutal even, and I know I deserve nothing other than what I work for. I'm entitled to nothing, and that's totally alright. The reason I believe that progressively more people like him are coming is due to the coddling and complete lack of hardship which American kids today enjoy courtesy of lazy, suburban life. That kind of upbringing doesn't prepare you for a job, a family or anything else difficult and rewarding to acquire and maintain.
Paying attention to the world and my relation to it, as well as admitting my inadequacies, has helped to reshape my ego into one which will actually benefit me and those around me. My old classmate, on the other hand, has an ego so large and poisoned by laziness and fundamentalism that he will never be able to learn the lessons in life which are the most important, will continually attempt to enforce his insane and unrealistic view of the world onto everything around him and he will fail every time. Moral of the story: Embrace humility and relish sanity; reject it, and become an asshole and/or a lunatic.
No moral system can rest solely on authority. ~A.J. Ayer
(Score: 2) by Bot on Saturday June 04 2016, @01:32AM
That seems a narcissist. You are right in associating the trophy generation with narcissism, even if it the objective would be to promote equality (which is evil, on entering the real world the student is even more shocked), a narcissist mind filters out everybody else, so the equalizing part gets lost.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 04 2016, @09:55PM
Here's another one [wikipedia.org] from 20+ years ago.