WASHINGTON: The US police investigating the Santa Clara shooting spree on Sunday night are exploring `personality problems within the family’ or a family dispute even as they finally identified Devan Kalathat, formerly Devarajan, as the assailant.
Investigations thus far show that Kalathat, an engineer with Yahoo and a naturalised US citizen, had bought two handguns recently - one of it roughly around the time brother-in-law Ashok and family arrived from India about two weeks ago for a oneyear assignment with Hewlett-Packard.
``Multifaceted difficult family dynamics are being explored between several members of the family,’’ Santa Clara police Lt. Phil Cooke said.
Having more or less ruled out a financial motive, investigators are also examining if a family dispute triggered the mayhem. Police are also awaiting laboratory results of tests for drugs and alcohol.
Referred to as Raghavan Devarajan in reports from India, the Indian engineer had changed his name and that of his wife and two children in 2002.
His wife, the only survivor in the shootout, was still in a critical condition. The family had moved to the US about 15 years ago.
The Santa Clara identified the dead as Kalathat, 42, his 11-year-old son, Akhil Dev; his 4-year-old daughter, Negha Dev; his brother-in-law, 35-year-old Ashok Appu Poothemkandi; his sister-in-law, 25-yearold Suchitra Sivaraman; and the couple’s daughter, 11-month-old Ahana Ashok.
The name of Kalathat’s wife was not released, with Cooke saying: “We do have a living victim of this tragedy that deserves some privacy.” Former neighbours of the Kalathats in Sunnvale remembered them as ``the nicest couple’ and the incident came as “an extreme shock”, according to accounts in the California media.
``They seemed like a very normal, happy couple.
I don’t think there were any issues,” said Reenu Cherian, a board member of the Malayalee Association of Northern California, who had fond memories of getting together for dinner with Kalathats or to play rummy with mutual friends.
