Suspect arrested after Caltech scientist fatally shot at his home outside LA | US universities
A renowned scientist from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), who has studied distant planets and other areas of astronomy for decades, was recently shot and killed at his home in a rural community outside Los Angeles, authorities said.
Carl Grillmair, 67, died Monday of a gunshot wound to the torso in Llano, an unincorporated community in the Antelope Valley, according to the L.A. County medical examiner’s office. The county sheriff’s department said it arrested a suspect in Grillmair’s murder and identified him as 29-year-old Freddy Snyder.
Snyder faces a murder charge in connection with Grillmair’s death, as well as auto theft and burglary charges in other cases. He remained in custody on Friday.
Los Angeles Times A Caltech spokesman was quoted as confirming that the university had hired Grillmair as a research scientist. He helped explore the universe as part of Caltech’s Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, a partner of the US space agency NASA, the National Science Foundation, and researchers around the world.
Grillmair’s resume He marshals more than four decades of experience in his field, including hundreds of publications, contributed articles, and abstracts, as well as a medal for outstanding scientific achievement from NASA.
“He was very famous in astronomy and a very well-known scientist,” Sergio Fajardo-Acosta, who worked with Grillmair at Caltech for 26 years, told the Times. “His legacy will live on forever”
Local deputies responded to an emergency call reporting an assault with a deadly weapon at Grillmair’s home shortly after 6 a.m. Monday, authorities said.
They said deputies found Grillmair shot once on his front porch. Medical teams determined that the person died at the scene.
Deputies investigating Grillmair’s murder reportedly arrested Snyder in connection with a recent carjacking. Authorities later charged Snyder with Grillmair’s murder, the nearby carjacking and a burglary reported on Dec. 28, according to court records reviewed by the Guardian.
It was not immediately clear whether Grillmair had met Snyder.
Fajardo-Acosta told the Times that Grillmair enjoyed his remote home in Southern California’s Antelope Valley because it allowed him to easily study the stars at night. In Fajardo-Acosta’s words, he did this in his own astronomical observatory in his home, equipped with various telescopes.
Some reacting to the news of Grillmair’s death noted that he was killed nearly two months after the December shooting of Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Nuno Loureiro that devastated the international scientific community.
Loureiro and the suspect in his murder had previously attended the same university program in Portugal. The suspect later died by suicide after fatally shooting two students at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, about 50 miles (80 km) from the suburban Boston home where Loureiro was killed, authorities said.
