American Nightmare: Indian IT pro wipes out family in murder-suicide in second such incident this year

WASHINGTON: In the second episode of its kind this year, an immigrant Indian professional wiped out his family in a murder-suicide incident, raising questions about whether the famed American dream is turning into a nightmare for some.
Police in the affluent neighborhood of San Mateo, California, said that following a welfare check alert, they found a couple, later identified as Anand Sujith Henry, 37, and Alice Priyanka Benziger, 38, dead in their bathroom from gunshot wounds.The couple’s four year old twins, Noah and Neithan, were also found dead inside one of the home’s five bedrooms.
“Based on the information we have at this time, this appears to be an isolated incident with no danger to the public as we are confident the person responsible was located within the home,” police said, suggesting it was a case of murder-suicide. They did not elaborate on how the boys died.
Henry had worked as a Software Engineering Manager at Google for eight years and Meta/Facebook for 17 months before co-founding an artificial intelligence firm called Logits in 2023. He had earlier worked at Salesforce and had interned at Adobe Systems, according to his social media profile.
Benzinger was a date science manager at Zillow, a real estate company, after stints at Dictionary.com, Idibon, and Change.org.
The couple, hailing from Kerala, were both alumni of TKM Engineering College near Kollam, and later attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
Local media reports indicated they had a troubled marriage, with frequent police interventions after they moved to the Bay Area, where they bought the $ 2.1 million suburban home after living in four different San Francisco apartments.
The reports also said Henry had filed for divorce in December 2016 but had reconciled before the birth of twins, and that Benzinger’s mother was staying with them till recently before returning to India.
This is the second such murder-suicide episode involving seemingly successful and affluent Indian immigrants, following a similar incident in Massachusetts in January in which Rakesh Kamal, 57, shot dead his wife Teena Kamal, 54, and their college-going daughter Arianna Kamal, 18 before turning the gun on himself.
The Kamals, both highly educated professionals, had co-founded an education systems company called EduNova in 2016, but had dissolved it in 2021 after financial setbacks that undercut their affluent lifestyle in a $ 5 million suburban home.
The tragic stories appear to underscore the pressure on Indian immigrant professionals and Indian-Americans, idealized as a model minority, to present themselves as successful and wealthy.
Indian-Americans have the highest average household income among all ethnicities in the US ($126,891, almost twice the US average of $65,316), but that topline would barely qualify as modest in the Bay Area and other affluent pockets in America.
Earlier this month, California lawmaker Barbara Lee called for a $50/hour federal minimum wage, more than six times the current federal minimum wage in the United States, saying Californians cannot get by on less than $100,000 a year a due to the high cost of living in the state.
The current national minimum wage at $7.25 an hour; California’s is more than double — $ 16 an hour.
“In the bay area, I believe it was the United Way came out with a report that said $127,000 for a family of four is just barely enough to get by. Another survey said $104,000 for a family of one, barely enough to get by,” Lee said.