Posted 1:55 AM by Blah blah

Guyang Huang/Tanya Holzmayer shooting/murder/suicide

More on the tragedy of Guyang "Matthew'' Huang, the seemingly mild-mannered top genetic scientist from China who shot and killed his former boss, Tanya Holzmayer, a top scientist from Russia. Huang had a wife and young daughter. Holzmayer had a teenaged son. The San Jose Mercury News showed Huang's picture and he looks like the typical mild-mannered, overachieving guy from China who gets his PhD here. Huang had been active in helping the Chinese-American community and also in the pro-democracy movement for China. Very very sad when even a man like this---who dedicates his life to helping save lives---can snap.

Now I am one of the top search results on Yahoo for this Guyang Huang story, so I will try to put links to the articles as I find them for ya. Amazing how a blog like this can be a faster and more durable source of news than the original newspaper, especially since it removes the original article after seven days.

Stories about missing/dead scientists. Gruesome.

The SF Chronicle's report on the tragedy. Here is a followup article from the Mercury, in full:

Posted on Sat, Mar. 02, 2002

Shootings bewilder biotech colleagues
THEY SAY SUSPECTED GUNMAN WAS WELL-LIKED, BRILLIANT
By Sean Webby, Truong Phuoc Khánh and Lisa Krieger
Mercury News

The scientist who police say killed his boss and then took his own life had been fired from his job at a Menlo Park biotech firm because the company thought he was working for someone else on the side, a friend and one-time academic adviser said Friday.

On Wednesday night, Guyang ``Matthew'' Huang shot and killed Tanya Holzmayer, a respected genome scientist who had fired him months before. He then drove from her Mountain View home to Foster City, where he called his wife, told her what he had done and what he was about to do. He then turned the gun on himself.

``It just doesn't make any sense,'' said Maurille Fournier, who was Huang's doctoral adviser at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and oversaw Huang's groundbreaking genome research from 1986 to 1992.

On Friday, Fournier replayed in his mind two conversations -- two moments that might provide clues, that might offer some explanation for something so unfathomable.

Fournier said he met with Huang in August, two months after Huang had been fired from PPD Discovery. During their conversation, Huang insisted he had done nothing wrong. He had intellectual irons in many fires -- he always had, both here and in China, where he had a relationship with another biotech firm.

Huang's voice echoed his despair, Fournier recalled. I just don't understand, Huang told him. Huang said PPD knew of his outside work and did not disapprove. PPD has refused to comment beyond confirming that Huang and Holzmayer were former employees.

Sharing successes

Months earlier, Fournier had sat down to dinner at a Silicon Valley restaurant with Huang and Holzmayer, whom Fournier knew by reputation in the biotech community.

Fournier recalled the pair of scientists -- one born in China, one born in Russia -- spent much of the dinner cheering each other's tales of immigrant struggles and scientific success.

Nothing about that dinner, Fournier said, remotely foreshadowed what happened Wednesday night.

Police believe that Huang lured Holzmayer to her door by ordering a pizza delivery to her home. When the Domino's deliveryman rang her doorbell, the scientist answered. Huang then shot her dead.

What remains is the search for elusive answers. Most notably, did something happen in the eight months that elapsed between Huang's firing and Wednesday's violence?

Fournier said Huang had been traveling to and from China, continuing research and teaching at the elite Fudan University in Shanghai.

``He certainly could have found another job, but it could be that he has not been able to find a job that suits his brilliance,'' Fournier said.

Huang, 38, was a well-respected scientist, husband and father of a young daughter. He and Holzmayer, 46, had spent their careers mapping and studying genetic code to unlock the mysteries of such things as disease and growth processes.

Huang was known for his ambition to make life better, through both scientific research and social activism.

Huang was from Shanghai, where he stood out even among the already distinguished students at Fudan. To get there, he had scored 11th out of 230,000 students on his college entrance exams.

Wei Mao, now working for IBM as a visual designer, studied with Huang there.

``He studied very, very hard; he never played,'' Mao said. Mao recalled physical education classes when he would glance over and see Huang in a corner studying a book of English vocabulary, oblivious to the exercising students around him.

One of Fudan's top students, Huang came to the United States to pursue genomics, the study of human genes. Fournier said he was dazzled by the young man's brilliance, by his hunger for knowledge pursued with almost tireless energy and enthusiasm.

One time, the professor recalled, Huang asked to go deer hunting with another student. He didn't particularly like the thought of killing a deer. He just wanted to know how it was done.

Huang also began working with Chinese-Americans, at first informally by helping a Chinese family arrange a traditional funeral for a student in Amherst who had been killed in a car wreck. Later, he helped develop a communication network for Chinese-Americans and raised money for pro-democracy reformers in China.

New work in Seattle

After graduating, Huang and his wife, Penny, an equally brilliant scientist Huang had grown up with in Shanghai, went to Seattle for a rare and exciting opportunity.

From 1992 to 1997, Huang worked as a senior fellow at the University of Washington School of Medicine's Department of Molecular Biology in Seattle.

``He was very well-liked, always on top of stuff,'' said Amy Dao, who works in the department. There Huang was mentored by Leroy Hood, leader of the California Institute of Technology team that invented the DNA sequencer used to complete the Human Genome Project. Huang was part of a team created by Hood in 1992 that used $12 million from Bill Gates to establish an institute to identify genes in major diseases and determine how they work.

``This is a total shock to me. It is hard to imagine. They are loving people. I never saw a mean or hurtful side of him,'' said Tawny Biddulph, assistant to Hood at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.

Huang later worked for a series of companies including Pangea, now called DoubleTwist, in Oakland -- a company that produced systems using genetic data to identify sites in the body for targeting drugs.

In 1998, Huang began work for the Beijing Genomics Center. And in 2000 he was employed as director of microbiology for PPD, where Holzmayer was a vice president.

Fournier and others said PPD may have been concerned that Huang violated the company's intellectual property rules for employees. Like many other industries in Silicon Valley, biotechnology firms guard their secrets carefully and jealously, industry experts say.

By the end of 2001, Holzmayer also had left PPD, to begin her own company, according to Igor Roninson, a genome scientist with the University of Illinois-Chicago and a consultant for PPD.

Wednesday night, Holzmayer was at her apartment with her teenage son and his friend, according to neighbors.

Micheline Brogan, who lives six doors away from Holzmayer's home, said her family heard shots and then saw the pizza deliveryman ``hysterically'' running down the street.

Brogan, who is a nurse at El Camino Hospital, said the deliveryman said to call the police.

``He was in shock,'' she said. ``He kept showing me the pizzas.''

Brogan and Evan, her 15-year-old son, ran to their neighbor's home to find Holzmayer prone and bleeding in her doorway. Bullet shell casings lay around her.

The nurse checked for a pulse. There was none.

On Friday, a half-dozen flower vases rested near the front door with a burning candle. Members of the Holzmayer and Huang families have not spoken publicly since the shootings.
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Here's the first article from the Mercury:

Posted on Fri, Mar. 01, 2002

Man ambushed ex-boss, police say
PIZZA MAY HAVE BEEN RUSE; SUSPECT LATER FOUND DEAD
By Sean Webby and Lisa Krieger
Mercury News

Dr. Tanya Holzmayer, a pioneering scientist, was surprised Wednesday night to find a Domino's Pizza deliveryman at the front door of her Mountain View home.

Moments later, a former colleague appeared out of the dark, shot her dead and ran off, police said.

Guyang ``Matthew'' Huang called his wife in Foster City with the news: I just killed my ex-boss. Now I'm going to kill myself.

Within an hour, a jogger found Huang's body off a path near the San Mateo Bridge. A cell phone was in Huang's pocket and a .380-caliber handgun lay near his hand.

Investigators on Thursday were just beginning to put together the details of the deadly nexus between the two immigrant scientists.

``It looked like an ambush,'' said Mountain View Police spokesman Jim Bennett. ``He may have used the pizza to lure her out.''

A former colleague of both Holzmayer and Huang thinks he knows the motive: Holzmayer fired Huang from his job at PPD Discovery, a biotech company in Menlo Park, according to Dr. Igor B. Roninson.

``She told me she got orders from senior management to fire him,'' said Roninson, a genomic scientist with the University of Illinois-Chicago and a consultant for PPD. ``She had to fulfill those orders, but was very upset. She had no choice, no options.

``But this is a year later!''

A company spokeswoman said Huang left PPD in June, but she wouldn't confirm that he was fired. Neither Huang nor Holzmayer were still with the company. Holzmayer had quit in December to start her own biotech venture.

Both Holzmayer, 46, and Huang, 38, were highly regarded in genetics.

She was a Russian-born genomic scientist who had co-invented a tool that has helped find hundreds of molecular targets to combat cancer and HIV. He was a brilliant scholar -- scoring 11th out of 230,000 students on his college entrance exams in China -- and an activist who fought for reform in his homeland once he came to the United States to study in 1986.

Outside of the company's Menlo Park office on Thursday, puffy-eyed employees gathered in small groups but shook their heads when approached by a reporter.

On Wednesday, just past 8:30 p.m., the Domino's deliveryman had pulled up to Holzmayer's home on Windmill Park Lane. Holzmayer and her teenage son were inside when the doorbell rang. She told the deliveryman that she hadn't ordered a pizza, according to Mountain View police.

Huang appeared from behind the deliveryman. He shot Holzmayer several times at close range in the chest and head, police said. As Holzmayer fell in her doorway, Huang ran to a Ford Explorer and drove away.

Police said the deliveryman witnessed the shooting but was not involved. A Domino's spokeswoman said the driver wasn't hurt, but would be offered counseling and time off.

Just a few doors away, the Brogan family heard the shots, then the tires screeching, and saw the deliveryman running in a panic. After calling 911, Evan Brogan went with his mother, Micheline, a nurse, to their neighbors' home. Holzmayer was lying in her doorway with no pulse.

``We were just trying to help. But she was gone,'' Evan said.

Less than an hour after the shooting, Huang called his wife, according to Foster City Police Capt. Craig Courtin. He told her about the shooting and that he was going to kill himself, police said. He told her he was near their home by the bay. Then he hung up.

Huang's wife called 911, and Foster City police used search dogs to comb the area. They ran into a jogger who had seen Huang's body lying off the walkway that locals call ``The Levee.'' He had fired a single bullet into his head, according to Robert Foucrault, San Mateo County's acting coroner.

Soon afterward, police interviewed Huang's wife, whom they wouldn't identify. She said she believed that her husband had killed Holzmayer and told them where they both had worked.

People who answered the door Thursday at Huang's apartment declined any comment.

Holzmayer and her family came to the United States in 1989, according to Roninson, a classmate of hers at Moscow State University in Russia.

She was an intellectual, he said, torn between becoming a classical pianist or a scientist. She chose genomics over her beloved Chopin, focusing on helping create new drugs that interfere with replication of the virus that causes AIDS.

Until December, Holzmayer had served a four-year tenure as senior vice president of genomics for PPD Discovery, a division of PPD Inc. of Wilmington, N.C. It was at PPD Discovery that Holzmayer met Huang, who began working as the firm's director of molecular biology and bioinformatics in early 2000.

Roninson said Huang ``gave a perfectly normal, charismatic impression.''

Holzmayer told Roninson two weeks ago that she had just received funding for her new start-up venture to use modern methodologies to develop new drugs.

``She said she had never felt so happy in her life.''
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Contact Sean Webby at swebby@sjmercury.com or (650) 688-7577. Fax (650) 688-7555.