Indian-origin executive dies after being assaulted in US

A 41-year-old Indian-origin executive died in the United States, days after being assaulted during an altercation outside a restaurant in downtown Washington, news agency PTI reported.

A preliminary investigation revealed that Taneja and an unknown man were involved in a verbal duel which soon turned physical, WUSA — a television station in Washington DC, affiliated with CBS, stated. Taneja was knocked to the ground and hit his head on the pavement.

Later on Wednesday, he died from his injuries at the hospital, PTI report said.

The report also stated that police are now investigating Taneja’s death as a homicide. According to investigators, the officers responded to the 1100 block of 15th Street Northwest outside Shoto Restaurant around 2 am for an assault on February 2. Once officers arrived, they found Vivek Taneja on the pavement. He was taken to the hospital with life-threatening injuries, the PTI report said.

The police continue to search for the suspect who was captured on CCTV camera.

The Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) is actively seeking the public’s assistance in identifying and locating the suspect involved in the homicide, the PTI report stated.

On February 7, the victim succumbed to his injuries.

MPD offers a reward to anyone who provides information which leads to the arrest and conviction of the person or persons responsible for each homicide in the District.

Taneja is the sixth Indian-origin person to be killed in the US since January 2024. Three days ago, another Indian-origin student Sameer Kamath, who was pursuing a doctoral degree at Purdue University in Indiana, United States, was found dead, according to local media reports.

Last week, Neel Acharya, an Indian computer science and data science student at Purdue University in Indiana, who was initially reported missing by his mother, was found dead on campus. Just days before Acharya’s death, Shreyas Reddy Benigeri, a student at Lindner School of Business in Cincinnati, was found dead in Ohio.

Last month, Vivek Saini, an MBA graduate in the US, was brutally killed with repeated blows from a hammer by a homeless man inside a store in Lithonia, Georgia. And on January 20, Akul Dhawan, an 18-year-old Indian-American student, was found dead with signs of hypothermia on the back porch of a building near the University of Illinois.

Who was Vivek Taneja?

Taneja was the Co-Founder and President of Dynamo Technologies. According to the company’s website, Taneja led “Dynamo’s strategic, growth, and partnership initiatives, with an emphasis on the federal government contracting arena.”

The website also hailed Taneja as a “systems engineer by training, who had led numerous technical consulting engagements across the public and private sectors.”

His educational endeavors, according to the website, include a BA in Economics and Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Virginia, a MS in Telecommunications from George Mason University, and D.Eng. in Engineering Management and Systems Engineering from the George Washington University, where his doctoral research utilized a system dynamics approach to analyze the impact of electronic health care records on the United States healthcare system.

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