American dream, broken by death and despair

2023 saw the highest number of murder-suicides among Indian Americans. Why? America’s most successful ethnic community has a little-discussed problem: its members typically can’t cope with failure.

(Editor’s note: A version of this story appeared in the print edition of The Times of India, dated January 28, 2024. It is also available online.)

America’s most successful ethnic group – Indian Americans – had a strange, dark statistic to contend with as 2023 wound down. Last year saw the most number of murder-suicides in this community.

A data point totally out of sync with all the glittering stories of success, and one that, on closer examination, shows the ugly underbelly of the Indian American version of the American dream.

Mansions, moneylenders and murders

In a 2012 blog post, Rakesh “Rick” Kamal had this message for all parents: “Life is too short, and the years pass before you know it. Don’t waste one day. Express your love to your child today and as often as you can.” His only child, Arianna, was around seven years old then.

Roughly 11 years later, on the night of December 27, 2023, Kamal murdered Arianna by shooting her multiple times in the head as she slept in the family’s $6.7 million mansion in Dover, Massachusetts. He killed his wife, Teena, with the same brutal efficiency. Then, he turned the gun on himself.

Kamal’s finances were in shambles. He had too much debt. No way to pay it back.

READ: Rakesh Kamal shot wife, teen daughter before killing himself (January 4, 2024)

Kamal had filed for bankruptcy, and an eviction notice had been served on the house of this former technology entrepreneur three months before the double murder-suicide.

He had bought the house in 2019 for $4 million, putting down only 5%, borrowing the rest from the developer, with the condition that he would pay off the entire loan in two years. He defaulted.

When he murdered his family, Kamal didn’t even have a job; he owed almost $4 million to the developer with interest and fines that had accumulated on the loan.

He had also taken several loans from family members, including half a million dollars from his brother-in-law. But he said very different things to his family.

He had convinced his wife that he was soon going to buy a $16.5 million estate, including a palatial house, on Lake Chickamauga in Tennessee. Teena had started to buy furniture for their new home.

Numbers don’t lie, though, and his big lie was on the verge of being outed – that’s when Kamal chose death for his family and himself over facing the truth.

The grim list: Ohio to Texas to California to Maryland…

In January of 2023, news broke of the deaths of three family members in Dublin, Ohio. In a case now reminiscent of the Kamals, Rajan Rajaram, an engineer, killed his wife, Santhalatha Rajan, and their son Anish Rajan Rajaram, 19, before committing suicide.

There are no firm details as to what transpired in Rajaram’s life to take the life of his family members, before committing suicide.

The Columbus Dispatch reported that Rajaram, who worked for Cincinnati-based Technosoft Corporation, police had been in contact with Rajaram several times, most recently on December 30, 2022.

That night he called to report that his cellphone, laptop, 18 Google accounts and 15 Microsoft accounts had all been hacked. The run sheet shows that dispatchers were unclear whether it was a mental health complaint.

That case came on the heels of an Indian American father in Houston, Texas, Ponnazhakan Subramanian, stabbing his 9-year-old son to death, before trying to inflict fatal wounds on himself. Police, however, saved him.

Like Kamal, Subramanian, too, had seemed like a doting father. A childhood friend of the latter, in a Facebook post, had this to say of him: “The sweetest father to the child, a second mother to the boy, caring for him day and night and something should have gone terribly wrong with himself to get involved in such an act.”

READ: 200 hold vigil for boy slain by Indian American father (January 11, 2023)

Subramanian, who was indicted for capital murder in March, likely had marital discord in his life, which led him to the heinous act of taking his son’s life.

CBS reported that on January 6, police received a call from the neighbor of a woman in the 700 block of Anson Court, in Houston. The caller said the woman found her 9-year-old son unconscious and bleeding inside the home. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

What caught the imagination of the public in the United States, however, in January last year was the sensational case of an Indian American radiologist, Dr. Dharmesh Arvin Patel, who tried to kill his wife, two young children and himself by deliberately driving a car off a cliff, in California.

It was a miracle Dr. Patel didn’t ask for. The car plunged more than 250 feet off the face of a highway called Devil’s Slide, outside San Francisco, on Jan 2. But Dr. Patel, his wife, Neha, and their seven-year-old daughter, and four-year-old son survived.

READ: Tesla Devil’s Slide crash driver charged with attempted murder (January 31, 2023)

He has since then been charged with three counts of attempted murder. His lawyers have argued that he’s mentally ill and should not be prosecuted. The case again comes up for hearing in March this year.

In August, Baltimore County police, in Maryland, on a welfare check, found the bodies of Prathiba Y. Amarnath, 37, her husband, Yogesh H. Nagarajappa, 37, and their six-year-old son, Yash Honnal.

Authorities later determined that Yogesh shot dead his wife and child, before killing himself. A motive for the double murder-suicide was not readily apparent and law enforcement has not ventured an explanation, reported Law & Crime.

A GoFundMe to help repatriate the bodies of the family to India, raised more than $53,000. It read, in part: “Life’s intricate tapestry occasionally unravels abruptly, leaving voids that resonate profoundly with those left behind. Yogesh, his cherished wife Pratibha, and their vibrant 6-year-old son Yash were the embodiment of a joyous family. Drawn by dreams and hopes for a better life, they chose Towson as their home in the U.S. Tragically, they fell victim to a harrowing incident, their lives ending far too soon.”

In another difficult case to decipher a motive, the bodies of Tej Pratap Singh, 43, his wife Sonal Parihar, 42, and their two children, a 10-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl, were found in their house in Middlesex County, New Jersey, in October. Tej, an engineer and an IIT Kanpur alum, shot dead his three family members, before taking his own life.

READ: Karnataka techie couple, son found dead in double murder-suicide (August 22, 2023)

Neighbors told News 12 they seemed to be a happy and loving family. The children were often seen outside playing with their parents. The Plainsboro Police were called to the house on a Wednesday afternoon, to perform a welfare check. That’s when police discovered all four bodies.

A month later, in November, an Indian American male, Om Brahmbhatt, 23, of South Plainfield, New Jersey, was charged with three counts of first-degree murder for shooting dead his grandparents and his uncle. The father of a four-year-old son, Brahmbhatt called the police after the murders and turned himself in.

Brahmbhatt told police he shot his grandparents in the head while they were sleeping in a bed together. He then went to the other room and allegedly shot his uncle multiple times.

Brahmbhatt will remain jailed while his case goes before a grand jury, a judge ruled last month, reported NJ.com. No alleged motive for the killings was revealed in court.

Mental health experts say the stigma surrounding mental health, which remains deeply ingrained among Indian Americans, is one of the reasons for the spike in murder-suicides within the community in recent years.

READ: Indian IT professional, pregnant wife found dead at New Jersey home (April 9, 2021)

“Frequently, conditions such as anxiety and depression are left unaddressed, even among highly educated individuals,” says Benoy Thomas, a mental health expert, currently working for the US federal government.

“In the pursuit of the so-called ‘American dream’, setbacks, such as business failures accompanied by personal debt, and the potential burden on the entire family, or even job loss, happen to anyone.”

Thomas, based in the Washington area, said for many Indian Americans, “the weight of failures becomes overwhelming, leading them to choose flight over fight in the face of adversity” and, tragically, “suicide or murder-suicide may be seen as an escape from the shame associated with perceived failures.”

It’s an All-American thing

According to the Violence Policy Center (VPC), murder-suicides are a shockingly common form of gun violence in America — an estimated 10 such incidents occur each week.

VPC research has found that nearly 1,200 Americans die in murder-suicides each year. Nine out of 10 murder-suicides involve a gun. In nearly two-thirds of all murder-suicides, an intimate partner of the shooter is among the victims.

So, Indian Americans may just be catching up with a national trend. 2023 was the year such tragedies occurred with disconcerting frequency in the community. But there have been heartrending cases in recent years.

In 2021, Bhupinder Singh shot dead his stepdaughter and mother-in-law, and wounded his wife, in upstate New York. He then killed himself. Rashpal Kaur, identified by the Albany Times Union as Singh’s wife, was shot in the arm but managed to escape.

READ: Indian American family found dead in possible murder-suicide (October 6, 2023)

A neighbor told the Times Union that he was lying in bed that night when he heard his doorbell ring nonstop. “Help me! Help me!” he heard someone scream. That was Kaur.

That same year, police found the bodies of Chandrasekhar Sunkara, 44, Lavanya Sunkara, 41, and their two children, two boys, 15 and 10. All had fatal gunshot wounds. Astonishingly, Sunkaras were hosting another family of four when the murder-suicides happened.

The couple were IT professionals. Heavy.com reported Chandrasekhar had worked for the Technical Service Bureau division of the Iowa Department of Public Safety for 11 years as a civilian employee.

READ: Sugar Land murder-suicide: Sreenivas Nakirekanti himself called 911 before committing suicide (February 19, 2019)

Lavanya had worked as a software development consultant for Lean TECHniques, Inc. of Johnston. The couple’s sons, Prabhas and Suhas, were avid basketball players, and were in the school team.

In 2021 again: Arati Balaji Rudrawar, 30, was stabbed to death by her husband, Balaji Bharat Rudrawar, in New Jersey. He was also found dead with stabs from the same knife. Arati was seven months pregnant with the couple’s second child at the time of her death. Their three-year-old daughter, Viha Rudrawar, was found crying on the balcony of their house before the police were called.

No motive was determined for the ghastly act. A GoFundMe for the child later collected more than $143,000. She was sent to India, to live with her grandparents.

In 2019, an Indian American couple was found dead in Sugar Land, Texas. Investigation revealed that Sreenivas Nakirekanti, 51, shot and killed Shanti Nakirekanti, 46, before taking his own life. The couple’s son was away at college. Their 16-year-old daughter slept through the incident.

Sugar Land city spokesperson Doug Adolph told The American Bazaar that the police believe Sreenivas called 911 and provided his address, just before turning the gun on himself. He said the murder-suicide “was related to marital issues.”

Why don’t they call for help?

Mental health specialist Thomas noted that some of these murder-suicides might have been influenced significantly by domestic violence, often overlaid by issues like jealousy, spousal relationship problems, disputes related to dowry and child custody.

“Indian Americans often excel in concealing issues beneath a facade of normalcy until a catastrophic event unravels,” he said.

Pointing out that hotlines like the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline and the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-7233 are readily accessible, he said, “A simple call to these hotlines has the potential to save lives, providing a crucial lifeline for those in distress.”

But when things go wrong in America’s most successful ethnic group, the ‘failures’, thanks to their rigid ‘cultural mores’, reach for the gun, not for the phone.