Sameer Kamath died by suicide, coroner says
The body of Indian American Purdue University student Sameer Kamath (inset) was found at NICHES land trust in Warren County, Indiana. He is the fifth Indian or Indian American student to die under mysterious circumstances in the United States.
Indian American student, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering at Purdue University, died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound
Sameer Kamath, a 23-year-old Indian graduate student of Purdue University, Indiana who was found dead in a nature preserve at Crow’s Grove, Warren County Monday reportedly died by suicide.
Kamath, a doctoral candidate in mechanical engineering, had died by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Warren County Coroner Justin Brummett found after a Tuesday autopsy, according to a press release.
RELATED: Another Indian student from Purdue University found dead (February 7, 2024)
Kamath was from Massachusetts, mechanical engineering head Eckhard Groll said in an email to the ME community, local newspaper The Exponent reported. He received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and came to Purdue in the summer of 2021.
He graduated from the department with a master’s degree in mechanical engineering on Aug. 4, according to the summer commencement program. Kamath was slated to graduate from the doctoral program in 2025, according to his LinkedIn profile.
The fifth such case of an Indian student’s mysterious death in America in less than a month has sent shock waves in the community.
READ: Neel Acharya, missing Indian student, found dead (January 30, 2024)
The incident came days after another Indian-origin student, Neel Acharya, pursuing a double major at the prestigious Purdue University, was found dead on Jan 29 near the airport. Authorities have ruled out any foul play in his death saying the autopsy revealed no signs of trauma on Acharya’s body.
Three days later, Shreyas Reddy Benigeri, 19, a student of Business Statistics at the Lindner School of Business, Cincinnati, Ohio was found dead on Feb 1. While the US police are investigating the matter, authorities do not suspect foul play at this stage.
Benigeri, did his BTech from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani in Rajasthan, before coming to the US.
READ: Indian student killed by homeless man in Georgia (January 29, 2024)
On Jan 16, 25-year-old Vivek Saini, an Indian American, was fatally attacked in Georgia state’s Lithonia city by a homeless drug addict.
In a similar incident, 18-year-old Indian American student, Akul B. Dhawan, was found dead outside the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) on Jan 20.
Dhawan reportedly went missing in the early hours of January 20 and was found dead 10 hours later on the back porch of a building near the university campus. His parents have blamed the school for negligence.
However, according to the authorities no foul play was suspected in Dhawan’s death, which they ruled as “accidental.”
Indian students became the largest group of international graduate students in the United States in 2023 making up more than a quarter of the over one million foreign students in the country.
