Man ambushes and kills ex-boss with pizza ruse then commits suicide
Patty
PIZZA MAY HAVE BEEN RUSE; SUSPECT LATER FOUND DEAD
By Sean Webby and Lisa Krieger
San Jose Mercury News
March 1, 2002
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.''
Patty
Shootings bewilder biotech colleagues
THEY SAY SUSPECTED GUNMAN WAS WELL-LIKED, BRILLIANT
By Sean Webby, Truong Phuoc Khánh and Lisa Krieger
San Jose 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.