A 46-year old Indian-American lawyer dressed in military garb and sporting Nazi emblems, went on a shooting rampage in Houston, Texas, Sept. 26. Investigators are still trying to figure out Nathan DeSai’s motive. News reports said he appeared to show signs of mental stress in the days leading up to the attack and Indian-American mental health experts say such incidents can be prevented if help is sought.
While no one was killed, DeSai, who college friends said they knew as “Niren,” began firing indiscriminately at morning commuters near a strip mall not so far from his home, injuring 9 people before being brought down by the police.
Police found a Thompson submachine gun and nearly 2,600 rounds of ammunition inside his Porsche convertible apart from the .45-caliber handgun he was carrying, all legally purchased, and a sheathed knife. Seventy five spent shell casings were recovered at the scene.They also found a notebook with a Nazi symbol, the Washington Post reported. Ironically, college friends are quoted in media reports saying DeSai had been the member of a Jewish fraternity, CBSNews reported.
Their search of DeSai’s apartment revealed more military memorabilia dating back to the Civil War era.
His name was written in some reports as DeSai, with the letter in the middle capitalized to give it a European flavor. The CBS News reported DeSai changed his name from Niren to Nathan in 2001, quoting from court documents. His father has been identified as Prakash Desai, an 80-year-old geologist.
While the motivation has yet to be pinned down, Houston Mayor Sylvester Taylor indicated it may be because DeSai broke up recently with the law firm he and his friend had founded. His friend and ex-partner Kenneth McDaniel told the Houston Chronicle that they separated this February and countered claims DeSai was dismissed or upset with the firm. However, DeSai’s father, who had dinner with his son the night before, is quoted saying his son was upset about the firm’s breakup.
“He’s upset about the law practice not going well – financial reasons,” Prakash Desai told KTRK TV. He also said his son owned guns to protect himself from clients who were sometimes “weird.” Besides, as DeSai’s father told the Houston Chronicle, his son had been worried about work and getting new clients. “We are not getting any business. … “Who wouldn’t be worried?” his son told him, media reports quoted the father.
A revealing anecdote from the property manager of DeSai’s building shows the perpetrator may have become mentally unstable in the weeks before the shooting. John Elmore told KTRK that DeSai had begun to act as if someone was “out to get him,” and had recently waved his gun on a construction crew repairing the roof.
“He apparently had some paranoia,” Razia Kosi, a mental health therapist in Atlanta, told News India Times. “It’s not clear how long he had this and whether people he knew detected a change in his behavior.”
While authorities puzzled over what set off the rampage by a well-education professional, and a lawyer at that, South Asian mental health experts said psychological problems tended to get hidden away and ignored, rather than treated as something requiring help.
It is hard Kosi said in the South Asian community and even generally, to seek help, especially when you are a professional like DeSai was.
It’s also difficult for people close to the person, to detect signs of mental health issues. “The person might be putting so much energy into pretending they are fine,” Kosi said.
“Getting treatment and overcoming the stigma of mental health needs societal empathy with the sufferer,” said Rahul Sharma, a clinical psychologist in Chicago who has counseled many South Asians.
Indian-Americans have usually been the victims in such attacks, from the Virginia Tech massacre carried out by a student which left 32 dead, including several of Indian origin, in April 2007, to the Wisconsin Gurdwara massacre of 2012 in which six Indian-Americans were killed by a white supremacist.
This is possibly the second mass shooting by an Indian-origin person in the U.S. One in 2003, at Case Western University in Cleveland, involved a disgruntled student Biswanath Halder, who took several people hostage and killed one student before being apprehended. He is serving life in prison.
Another case attracting national coverage was in January this year, when Mainak Sarkar, a former student armed with an AK 47, entered University of California, Los Angeles, shot and killed his professor before killing himself. Although the university was put in a lockdown and his weapon created a panic, he killed himself before killing any more people. He had earlier killed his wife in Minnesota.
The Houston shooting adds another facet to the otherwise staid reputation as overachievers that Indian-Americans generally hold in this country.
Members of DeSai’s fraternity from the University of Houston where the shooter studied in the early 1990s told CBS News they could hardly believe the shooter was their frat-brother ‘Niren’. Ian Rosenberg, a fraternity mate of DeSai said, “I don’t know what to think. (It’s) dumbfounding.” He noted that in fact DeSai helped restart the Jewish fraternity after Sigma Alpha Mu had been closed for years at Houston.
Now DeSai boasted Nazi trappings during the shooting in Houston.
DeSai earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Houston, and his law degree from the University of Tulsa, specializing in criminal, business and family law, the Houston Chronicle reported.
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