GLOBAL PRAYER NETWORK: UCLA shooting victim was Westmont grad, strong Christian

Jumat, 03 Juni 2016

UCLA shooting victim was Westmont grad, strong Christian

By Mark Ellis, Senior Correspondent for ASSIST News Service

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (ANS -- June 3, 2016) -- Engineering Professor William Klug, 39, killed at UCLA on Wednesday by a disgruntled former student was a strong Christian, an avid surfer, and Little League coach who leaves behind a wife and two young children.

In a feature for Westmont College’s magazine, Klug spoke about his faith and his career saying:

“Knowing there is a God responsible for the world makes a big difference in my motivation to understand it better. I developed a habit of relying on God for what I felt was beyond my ability to control or what I couldn’t do for myself.”

The tragic circumstances of his untimely death were certainly beyond his “ability to control,” carried out by a shooter identified as Mainak Sarkar, a former doctoral student who had accused Klug of stealing his computer code and giving it to someone else, the LAPD said June 2nd.

Sarkar, a resident of Minnesota, appears also to have killed a woman in a small town in that state and had a “kill list,” that she was on, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck said.

Klug’s wife, Mary Elise Richter Klug, is also an engineer; she graduated from Westmont in 1997. A native of Cerritos, California, she is an accomplished, award-winning ceramics artist. The couple married in 1999.

They lived in El Segundo with their two kids where Klug coached his son’s Little League team, according to CBS Los Angeles. His son is in the fourth grade.

Writing in Westmont College’s magazine, Klug stated that attending a Christian college gave him an opportunity to build a more intellectual basis for his faith. “My young, naive, and parent-based beliefs went through a transformation.”

“I basically chucked everything I knew and began to think and reason carefully. Eventually I made my faith my own. I ended up where I had started, but with a much deeper understanding.

Photo captions: 1) Former PhD student Mainak Sarkar (left) and his professor William Klug, who he killed. 2) Mark Ellis.

About the writer: Mark Ellis is Senior Correspondent for the ASSIST News Service (www.assistnews.net), and also founder of www.GodReports.com, a website that shares stories, testimonies and videos from the church around the world. He is also co-host for "Widows on the World" with ANS Founder, Dan Wooding, which is airred on the Holy Spirit Broadcasting Network (http://hsbn.com).