Indian American CEO shot dead in Silicon Valley

By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 19 November 2008, 16:37 IST   |    20 Comments
Printer Print Email Email
San Francisco: An Indian American CEO and Director of a semi-conductor company in Silicon Valley was shot dead allegedly by one of his disgruntled former employees, who was let go recently, the police said. The police have identified the victim as Sid Agrawal of SiPort Inc, a semi-conductor company based in Santa Clara. The company specializes in developing digital radio semiconductors. It raised t$20 million in venture capital last year. Two others were killed in the Friday afternoon shooting at the company's Office. One of them was being identified as Brian Pugh, vice-president of the firm. The name of the third victim, a woman, who is identified to be Marilyn Lewis, the Head of Human Resources. The suspect has been identified as Jing Wu, 47, an engineer, who was fired by the company recently. Friday's violent scene erupted just before 4 p.m. Wu arrived at SiPort at 3255-7 Scott Blvd. and opened fire. After he was let go on Friday morning, police said he returned sometime after 3 pm. "He requested a meeting with several company officials. It was during this meeting that Jing Wu took out a 9 mm handgun and shot and killed all three officials," said Chief Stephen Lodge of Santa Clara Police. Sid had more than twenty five years of experience at startup and established high technology companies. At startup ventures, Sid had held executive management positions at Alliance Semiconductor (IPO), Layer Five Networks (acquired by Juniper) and Synaptics (IPO). Prior to startups, Sid held leadership marketing, sales and engineering positions at Adobe, Intel and Bell Labs. Sid was Electrical Engineering graduate from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India. He also had an M.S. degree from Southern Illinois University and an M.B.A. degree from the University of Chicago. This is the second such incident in a month involving an IIT graduate. Last month, Karthik Rajaram, an IIT graduate who lost his job, shot dead his wife, three sons and his mother-in-law. siliconindia condoles the death of Sid. Earlier this year, Sid had contibuted to siliconindia magazine on the state of the semiconductor industry https://www.siliconindia.com/guestcontributor/guestdesc.php?59