Upscale community turned upside down

by truthcaster | April 5, 2009 at 09:51 pm

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The quiet in the upscale community of Rivermark in Santa Clara, CA, with it's well manicured lawns and spotless paver streets, was shattered on Sunday night, March 29, 2009. The well-to-do neighborhood is home to mostly foreign born high-tech engineers.

Santa Clara police are investigating an apparent murder-suicide in a well-to-do neighborhood that left six people dead, including three children.

The killings took place Sunday night in Rivermark, a community northwest of Santa Clara. The gunman apparently roamed through the three-story town house, shooting people in various locations before taking his life on the top floor, according to Capt. Mike Sellers.

A woman in her mid-30s escaped and was found bleeding on the sidewalk. She was in critical condition at a local hospital Monday, Sellers said.

When authorities entered the town house they found the bodies of a girl estimated to be 4 years old, a boy estimated to be 10, a man in his 30s and a woman in her early 20s, all dead of gunshot wounds.

The shooter, a man in his mid-40s, died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Sellers said. Two handguns were found in the residence, according to police.

Apparently, there was a quarrel between the shooter and his brother-in-law who had just most to the U.S. from India and was living with the shooter and his family.

SANTA CLARA, CA – A 43-year-old Indian-American IT professional here went on a rampage and fired at his family after a quarrel with his brother-in-law, killing five people, including three children. He then shot himself dead with a gun reports said. The shooting took place on the night of March 30.

Police said his wife Abha, who is in her mid-30s, survived the slaughter and stumbled outside the house with multiple wounds. She is in hospital, in critical condition.

Details are sketchy pending investigation, but reports named the shooter as Ayyankoli Devarajan from a remote village in the Nilgiris, and his victims as his two school-going children Akhil and Ahaana who were said to have been enrolled at the Challenger School.

His brother-in-law Ashokan who worked for Hewlett Packard and had moved to the US on deputation along with his family and lived in the same house along with hs wife Suchitra, and their 11-month-old baby Neha were also shot and killed.

Devarajan was reportedly an engineer at Yahoo and had worked with Microsoft until a year ago.

Devarajan’s father-in-law, the grief-stricken Appu Master, 80, said the mass murder took place during dinner.

The family had moved to the US some 15 years ago.

Devarajan and Ashokan were two Malayalam-speaking IT professionals. According to a report in the San Jose Mercury News, an Indian passport was found inside the house.

A report in The San Francisco Chronicle described the shootings as “one of the deadliest such incidents of Santa Clara in recent history.”