NEW YORK: Ganesh Santhanakrishnan, 27, a former doctoral candidate who had become homeless and mentally unstable, committed suicide by jumping off the Tappan Zee Bridge, just north of New York City. This happened on April 3, a day or two after being released from the Westchester Medical Center’s psychiatric unit and three years after moving to the US from Tamil Nadu. At the time of his death he had been sleeping in a storage shed.
According to the Journal News, State police didn’t make Santhanakrishnan’s name public until they made contact with the man’s father in his native India. It turns out that the young man had been living the life of a loner in Ossining after losing his computer-related job in New Jersey. "He was alone in the country and apparently was experiencing some significant mental issues," said state police Investigator Noel Nelson.
"You could imagine what that must have been like for him - not to have anybody to either confide in or to be of assistance." Neighbors on Albany Post Road said that, over the past year, he exhibited increasingly erratic of lumber. "He was essentially a nuisance, chasing people down the street, chanting in the middle of the night, clapping his hands loudly till all hours of the night," said Chuck Mosello, owner of Corvettes of Westchester, located across the street from where the man was staying. "The guy was not well."
Swapna VenugopalRamaswamy of The Journal News, in a recent update on Ganesh, where she’s interviewed his distraught mother in Chennai, portrays him as an academically accomplished but fun-loving guy whose life went downhill after he lost student funding. "He loved to read Frederick Forsyth novels, and had the most infectious laugh," said Girishankar Gurumurthy, 27, who works for Texas Instruments in Bangalore, India.
These descriptions, however, bear little resemblance to what neighbors in Ossining witnessed during the past nine months. Santhanakrishnan seemed to descend into a mental abyss, howling into the night, sleeping in a storage shed. He had lost an extreme amount of weight. Gurumurthy himself viewed a recent picture of his old friend and said he hardly could recognize the man he knew in college. Santhanakrishnan, who had no criminal record, was arrested in March.
After a week in jail, he was evaluated in Westchester Medical Center’s psychiatric unit, then released - the day before he committed suicide. By October, Santhanakrishnan vacated his apartment, telling neighbors he had lost his job. He started renting a "12x12 concrete bunker" storage space off an alley behind the building for $200 a month to store his belongings, said Chris Hlavatovic, a tenant at the multifamily dwelling.
He also was permitted to use the driveway to park his car. But unbeknownst to anyone in the building, or the landlord, Santhanakrishnan started living in the bunker. Back in India, Santhanakrishnan’s parents suspected he was going through a rough patch with the job search and urged him to return there. He forbade his parents from calling him again.
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