SANTA CLARA, CA – A 43-year-old  Indian-American IT professional here went on a rampage and fired at his family after a quarrel with his brother-in-law, killing five people, including three children. He then shot himself dead with a gun reports said. The shooting took place on the night of March 30.

Police said his wife Abha, who is in her mid-30s, survived the slaughter and stumbled outside the house with multiple wounds. She is in hospital, in critical condition.

Details are sketchy pending investigation, but reports named the shooter as Ayyankoli Devarajan from a remote village in the Nilgiris, and his victims as his two school-going children Akhil and Ahaana who were said to have been enrolled at the Challenger School.

His brother-in-law Ashokan who worked for Hewlett Packard and had moved to the US on deputation along with his family and lived in the same house along with hs wife Suchitra, and their 11-month-old baby Neha were also shot and killed.

Devarajan was reportedly an engineer at Yahoo and had worked with Microsoft until a year ago.

Devarajan’s father-in-law, the grief-stricken Appu Master, 80, said the mass murder took place during dinner.

The family had moved to the US some 15 years ago.

Devarajan and Ashokan were two Malayalam-speaking IT professionals. According to a report in the San Jose Mercury News, an Indian passport was found inside the house.

A report in The San Francisco Chronicle described the shootings as “one of the deadliest such incidents of Santa Clara in recent history.”