To Poornima Ramarao, it has been clear since the moment she found out about the death of her son, OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, that he didn’t kill himself.
Since that day — Nov. 26 — Ramarao and her husband, Balaji Ramamurthy, have questioned the San Francisco medical examiner’s determination that their son died by suicide and have been calling for a full investigation into her son’s death. Ramarao has also repeatedly charged that her son was murdered and accused city officials of covering up the circumstances of his death.
The “only thing that keeps us going is we have to get justice [for] him,” Ramarao told The Examiner in a recent interview.
“We want people to know” the facts about Balaji’s case, she said, “and we want an investigation to open.”
In recent weeks, their pleas and suspicions have begun to be echoed by some powerful people, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, right-wing provocateur and news host Tucker Carlson, Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna and San Francisco Supervisor Jackie Fielder.
“Given your very serious concerns about foul play, I do believe that there should be a full and transparent investigation into the death by the FBI or appropriate agency,” Khanna said last week in a post on X directed at Ramarao.
In an emailed statement, Fielder said she was happy Khanna called on the FBI to investigate.
“I’m concerned about the circumstances surrounding Suchir’s death, which is why I think it needs a deeper investigation,” she said.
For now, any inquiry into Balaji’s death remains at the local level, although San Francisco officials to date have released no information to support their conclusion his death was a suicide.
The San Francisco Police Department’s investigation into Balaji’s death remains open and active, department spokesperson Officer Paulina Henderson said in an email. Because of that, the police declined to release a copy of the incident report regarding the death.
Likewise, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has not yet completed or released its forensic report, according to David Serrano Sewell, the office’s executive director. On its website, the office says it seeks to release such reports within 90 days of a person’s death. Balaji died Nov. 22, or about 60 days ago, according to Ramarao.
An OpenAI representative did not respond to a request for comment about the calls for a wider inquiry or Ramarao’s accusation that he was killed because of his whistleblowing activity.
Ramarao said she was outside Balaji’s San Francisco apartment when the police came at her request on Nov. 26 to do a wellness check on her son. She and her husband hadn’t heard from him since Nov. 22, she said, and he didn’t answer or return her call the following day.
When she went to his apartment from her home in Union City on Nov. 25, he didn’t open the door when she knocked. When she called later that day and asked police to do a wellness check, they told her a parent needed to be present before they could open his door, she said.
She said she filed a missing person complaint in Union City the next day, then went back to San Francisco and waited for the police to arrive. After they came and went into the apartment, Ramarao waited for someone to tell her what was going on. At that point, she hoped to hear that he wasn’t there, that he was off on a trip and just didn’t want to talk or had lost his cell phone, she said.
The “last thing we were expecting” was that he was dead, she said. But when a vehicle that wasn’t an ambulance drove up with a stretcher, “my heart sank,” she said.
The team from the medical examiner’s office spent about 40 minutes in Balaji’s apartment, Ramarao said. At 4 p.m., they gave her the keys to the apartment and told her she could collect her son’s body the following day, she told Carlson.
“Right from that moment, I see foul play,” she told Carlson. “Proper formalities were not followed.”
The Chief Medical Examiner’s Office did release Balaji’s body the next day, but it hadn’t done a “proper” autopsy, she said in her interview with Carlson.
Ramarao and her husband immediately commissioned a second autopsy from Dr. Joseph Cohen that raised doubts about the medical examiner’s determination of suicide, she told The Examiner. The trajectory the bullet took was atypical of a suicide, she said. The bullet took a diagonal path from Balaji’s forehead down through the base of his head, missing his brain, she said.
The second autopsy also found an injury on the left side of her son’s head, potentially indicating he had been assaulted before he was killed, she said.
Ramarao declined to provide The Examiner with a copy of the second autopsy report. Cohen did not respond to a request for comment.
She also hired a crime-scene investigator to take a look at the evidence in Balaji’s apartment, she said. A second investigator assessed pictures taken from the scene and raised his own questions about how her son died, saying there was reason to believe Balaji might have been killed. The investigator, Dr. Dinesh Rao of Jamaica, called for a reexamination of Balaji’s apartment.
“The crime scene examination is in adequate [sic] and incomplete and unscientific,” Rao said in his report, which Ramarao shared with The Examiner.
Rao did not respond to an email seeking comment.
Ramarao cited numerous other reasons why she doesn’t believe her son killed himself and said she’s dubious of the initial inquiry conducted by city investigators.
One of her primary reasons is his mental state. Balaji didn’t leave a suicide note and didn’t seem depressed in the days and weeks leading up to his death, she and her husband said. From his computer, they could see that he was browsing the web up until 10 p.m. on the night he died, she told Carlson. The last site he visited involved research on neuroscience, she told Carlson.
Ramarao said she spoke with Balaji on the morning of Nov. 21 — his 26th birthday. Ramamurthy said he spoke with Balaji the next day, after Balaji returned from a more than weeklong trip to the Catalina Islands with some old friends.
His son said he enjoyed the trip, Ramamurthy said.
“He was happy,” Ramarao said.
One of Balaji’s friends, who was with him on the trip, echoed that. Balaji at times seemed to be deep in thought on the trip and went on a walk by himself one morning, said the friend, who asked not to be named for fear of being doxed by online conspiracy theorists. But that wasn’t unusual behavior for Balaji, the friend said.
“I didn’t really notice anything out of the ordinary,” said the friend, who said he had been close to Balaji since middle school. “He was pretty much the same still, cracking jokes. He seemed like [he was in] a good mood.”
Balaji left OpenAI in August. In October, The New York Times published an interview with him in which he accused the San Francisco-based artificial-intelligence giant of breaking copyright laws when it was collecting data to train the model underlying its ChatGPT chatbot. In November, days before Balaji’s death, lawyers for the newspaper named Balaji as a witness in its copyright-infringement lawsuit against OpenAI.
Friends and family members told The Examiner that Balaji didn’t seem anxious about leaving his job or being a whistleblower. They also said he was making plans for the future, possibly to go back to school to get his Ph.D. or to launch his own AI startup.
“From what I could tell, he was excited about what the future had, and I think he wanted to explore a lot of his interesting ideas, and he kind of felt some freedom to do that,” said a second friend who said he had known Balaji since high school.
“I would be very surprised if it were a suicide,” said the second friend, who asked not to be named for fear of being harassed or impairing their job prospects in the tech industry. The person said they had spoken with 10 other friends of Balaji who felt similarly about his death.
That said, Ramarao acknowledged that Balaji had owned a gun since January. And both friends and family members said he kept things close to the vest, rarely talking about his feelings or his intentions.
His parents and friends didn’t know he had spoken with The Times until it published his article about him, they said. Nor did they know he was going to be a witness in the New York Times case against OpenAI, Ramarao said.
Even his closest friends said he didn’t talk with them about why he was thinking of leaving OpenAI until he left, they said.
“He kept things to himself. That was one of the problems,” Ramarao told The Examiner. “He was very secretive.”
______________
*HOT STUFF *
Dalam video Tucker Carlson posting #9 dia sebut adik CEO ChatGPT dakwa dirogol sekitar minit 12:30. Right after mak Suchir Balaji cerita yang Suchir nak join venture dengan Ann Altman, si mangsa.
This post contains more resources
You have to Login for download or view attachment(s). No Account? Register
Post time 25-1-2025 05:57 AMFrom the mobile phone|Show all posts
Edited by Dwdrum at 24-1-2025 03:09 PM
Harap budak ini bukan blacksheep dems... AI hot topics and openly discuss di bay area (silicon valley) bukan limited to AI saja tetapi super AI (ASI) ... Bukan new topic untuk jadi whitleblower.. Apabila stargate di caras trump sebab salah dems sendiri and techie titan lain ikut sama... Intel sudah ada super AI collab dengan british uni... Tetapi ummah pilih kramer dari sunak....
Musk co founder openai sudah quit sekarang... Sam altman hanya software engineer dahulu pernah kerja di bawah musk... Musk sendiri pernah bagi talk tentang future ASI problem... Celah bedah mana claimed balaji whistleblower...
Orang kena pay attention juga probably heshe lonely + nerd.... High potential heshe tidak jumpa date... Techie suffering being single... Limited women.. Worst place untuk lelaki jumpa mate option lain jadi gay...
Post time 25-1-2025 07:42 AMFrom the mobile phone|Show all posts
Tunggulah berapa la Elon Musk boleh bertahan dalam pentadbiran Trump. Awal lagi dah cari musuh dengan penyokong kuat Trump sendiri, Steve Bannon. Dia kritik program stargate ai secara open. Sedangkan ini adalah project pentadbiran Trump. Tingkah-laku dia memang mcm budak-budak dan tidak matang. Percaya atau tidak, Trump nampak lebih professional berbanding musk.
Post time 25-1-2025 08:31 AMFrom the mobile phone|Show all posts
Edited by Dwdrum at 24-1-2025 04:43 PM
ultra78 replied at 24-1-2025 03:42 PM
Tunggulah berapa la Elon Musk boleh bertahan dalam pentadbiran Trump. Awal lagi dah cari musuh denga ...
Ko dengki saja ini..semua sector semua sama saja competitive ... Heshe dapat his part terutama spaceX... Melayu suka condem and jadi pompom girl pick up fight sokong sana sini...sekarang di malaysia cina juga buka mata mahu develop ai chip buatan malaysia sebab donia perlu another competitor...memalu kan sunggub
Salah factor buat lelaki stress di SV... Kisah balaji jadi whistleblower ini heshe bawa ke public since Oct last year begitu... Sebelum election lagi... Issue violating copyright law... Bukan big issue.... OpenAi ini shares 49% milik microsoft... Bill gates... Depa lagi lagi legend issue begini...
Budak high achiever seperti balaji ini classic if tidak dapat attention... Etc ini.... Tempat gathering budak creme de la creme.... musk... Zuckerberg... Sergey brin among famous weirdos wujud di SV... Bukan hanya adults.. Among anak techies ini juga commit suicide di high schools... Peer pressure + ada yang sudah disuruh consume nootropic +obat stimulate otak.. Sini ada suicide cluster among kids/teenager...testimony parwnt semua anak baik and bright students... Memang depa begitu budak baik bukan rempits tetapi psychology depa banyak parents in denial..villian ciscle among high achiever... Women tidak strong enough untuk berada si bruh culture... Yang tahan yang berani tunjuk middle finger..
Post time 27-1-2025 01:49 PMFrom the mobile phone|Show all posts
Edited by Dwdrum at 26-1-2025 10:00 PM
Tinot7 replied at 26-1-2025 09:18 PM
Vicious cycle sbb makpak expek anak jadi sama haibat mcm deme?
Patutnya lek2 je la.. cer tgk mcm p ...
Vicious... Hahaha jadi villain... Yes... Selalu depa compete supaya anak masuk west coast top unis... Terutama nya stanford.. UCSF and UCB seperti balaji ini... Sudah ada cicle sendiri bermula di campus lagi....
Post time 28-1-2025 12:30 AMFrom the mobile phone|Show all posts
Edited by Dwdrum at 27-1-2025 09:15 AM
Tinot7 replied at 26-1-2025 10:08 PM
Tatau pulak deme fokus kat west coast shj.. ingatkan east coast unis ivy league yg glamer..
Kenal ...
Ini maybe famous luar US... Ivies ini.. If mahu establish di east better ivy...jika west coast better west side uni...culture quite different...and weather... Bagi aku bukan semua ivies level harvard or oxbridge....personal opnion aku big 4 universities the best option if ada peluang untuk dapat... Seperti harvard.. Stanford.. Mit... And caltech..
.
SV techies hantar anak di west coast memang mahu anak depa establish di SV juga...
Post time 24-1-2025 08:10 PM
变色卡
Author
Post time 27-1-2025 11:13 AM
