The man who gunned down his two children and three other relatives in an apparent murder-suicide had been helping those relatives settle into the area after a recent move from India, police said Tuesday.
Investigators did not have a motive for Devan Kalathat's rampage Sunday night, which left six people dead and one critically injured at his home in an upscale neighborhood of Santa Clara. They said they were exploring the possibility of a family dispute, but they did not believe it was financially motivated.
Police Lt. Phil Cooke said Kalathat, a 42-year-old engineer for Yahoo Inc., legally purchased a .45 semiautomatic handgun about two weeks ago, around the same that his brother-in-law arrived in the United States from India with his 25-year-old wife and 11-month-old daughter.
Police said Kalathat used that weapon and another handgun purchased in February during the shootings that killed brother-in-law Ashok Appu Poothemkandi, 35; sister-in-law Suchitra Sivaraman, 25; the couple's daughter Ahana Ashok; Kalathat's son Akhil Dev, 11, and daughter Negha Dev, 4.
Kalathat's wife, whose name was not released, survived but remained in critical condition Tuesday with multiple gunshot wounds, Cooke said.
Kalathat changed his name from Raghavan Devarajan after moving to the United States about 15 years ago. He was found on the home's top floor, dead from a self-inflicted wound. Both handguns were found at the scene.
Yahoo officials confirmed that Kalathat had been worked as an analytics engineer since 2004 but declined to comment further Tuesday.
Cooke said there was no reason to believe that Kalathat had been in danger of losing his job.
The family had recently moved from a modest apartment in Sunnyvale to the tony Santa Clara community of Rivermark, a planned community about 7 miles (11 kilometers) northwest of San Jose with a shopping center, playgrounds and a mix of town houses, condominiums and Spanish-style houses that go for $1 million. His children had been enrolled in a nearby private school.
Abhilash Appu, 32, a brother-in-law of Kalathat, told the San Jose Mercury News that he had no idea why the bright, quiet man would turn on his family.
Ashok Kumar Sinha of the Consulate Generals of India in San Francisco said it helped police notify relatives and would be working with the family to claim the bodies.
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Associated Press writer Lisa Leff in San Francisco also contributed to this report.
