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Comment by JuniperMesos | Hacker News Reader

My prediction is that it was a random home invasion robbery committed by someone with multiple previous felonies who had no idea that the person living in the house they were trying to rob was a MIT professor.

But I have no more information than anyone else does, I'm making a low-confidence educated guess, and at some point in the near future it's very likely that the professionals whose job it is to investigate serious crimes will have a better idea of what actually happened than anyone posting in this thread.

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Unlikely. He was killed in the foyer [1] of his building in an exceedingly safe city (Brookline, MA).

In a neighborhood with mixed SFHs and condos, it makes little sense to target a condo. Makes even less sense for someone to break in, but to shoot the victim outside, in the foyer.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CmbmBNre5SQ

Agree. Most killings are not random, but committed by someone the victim knows.

Yea even in the US where there's a rather lot of home invasions (~million/yr), even amongst the ones where the occupier is injured-or-worse (~250k/yr), very very few of them are fatal (<500/yr).

Other possibility; a disgruntled investor who poured millions into dead-end fusion research and now wishes they had invested in AI research instead? Blames the professor for persuading them to invest in fusion.

It's a tough one to find a motive for...

Can you quote 1 other example of a disgruntled investor that has killed an American academic over the last 50 years ?

They normally just have their friend the DA lock them up for "fraud"

This basically never happens, about 100 people die a year in the US during a “burglary gone wrong”. People think it’s common, though; it’s the go-to cover story in almost any Dateline episode.

That's 100 times more than I thought.

The us has a population of about 340,000,100. Notice where the 1 is.

Tangential but I think that's a terrible way of making your point because intuitively we don't look at digits of a numbers and think log scale. That looks more like 1/3 instead of 0.000029%.

You thought only one person a year died during break ins gone wrong? Vending machines kill more than that.

Legalizing vending-machine concealed carry was our first mistake.

you f around with a vending machine and it will f back... usually by falling on the poor shmuck

Genuinely believing that only one person in America dies in a home invasion is hard to take seriously.

I imagine most preteens in America have a better grasp of reality than the one you’re espousing here.

I just checked UK stats and from my reading of ONS's homicide data it's entirely possible it's around zero from burglary gone wrong.

The us is only 5 times bigger

IIRC hand guns are slightly harder to obtain in the UK. And also slightly less legal for civilians to own.

It's a reasonable guess, but 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery. Usually they're committed during the day when people are at work, and if not that then deep in the night for maximum cover. 8:30 is almost like the ideal time if you actually want someone to be there and answer the door at an hour where it wouldn't cause enough alarm for them to answer the door with a weapon.

When it comes to small-scale crime like this, the smartest thing is typically not to do it at all. So the people who do it will generally not be very smart.

Indeed, 8:30p is no different from 2p or 10a for the act.

It's most likely a matter of happenstance. It happened to be the warmest time of the day (even though it was evening). Maybe the thinking was someone was home to help them find the valuables, maybe not.

> 8:30p seems like a dumb time for a home robbery.

The assertion that there is some optimization for some specific imagined motivation, is literal fantasy.

Fewer crimes are committed when the weather is bad since criminals avoid going out like everyone else.

It's a fantasy that strongly correlates with facts. Home robberies are not evenly committed throughout the day.

In this day and age who robs homes any more? You'd be liable to get paid to take a bunch of junk away instead

When BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) came to Pleasanton CA my fox-news brainwashed racist aunt and uncle and their neighbors where legitimately convinced black people from Oakland were going to come take BART out from Oakland and steal their TVs. And this was back in the day of the giant bulky heavy-backed rear-projection TVs. I was like... first of all they drive cars now and second of all who is going to take BART to come rob you and third of all who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing!! And if they were going to take your 150lb TV they would need a truck and a dolly, not take public transit to do so.

Pleasanton remained safe and bland despite allowing evil public transit.

> who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing

BART service started in Pleasanton in 1997. In 1992 or 1993 I had a glass CRT TV stolen during a burglary at our house in exurban Connecticut. There's no reason to claim that TV theft is some myth. It was a crime that did in fact happen.

Ummm... Something tells me they didn't take the train to come steal your TV.

the did not, no. That's why I did not address that part of the comment, only the part claiming that no miscreant would want to carry a heavy TV.

The spirit of my comment is that they wouldn't take public transit to come steal TVs because nobody would intentionally schlep a giant stolen tv via public transit, they most likely would use cars.

yeah it turns out everyone else read the end of that sentence one way and I went the other. Although the image of a train car full of straphanger burglars with a tube TV between their legs, reading a newspaper folded into 1/8ths with their free hands is kind of funny.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304608

Did the thief take transit, though? We had a similar NIMBY argument in the area where some totally-not-racist people said thieves were going to bike from a predominantly black neighborhood 15 miles away to steal TVs, and it was so blatantly wrong that the local chief of police noted that the burglars they catch use stolen trucks or SUVs for the cargo capacity.

I only addressed "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing" because that's the only part of the comment I objected to. By now it seems like everyone is reading it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing for the duration of a light rail ride" whereas I read it as "who would want to carry this stupid heavy thing at all" and I'm the odd one out.

The little but wealthy town of Los Altos Hills next to Palo Alto had Flock come in and install their camera surveillance after a string of burglaries and one or two home invasion style robberies, it's a mostly rural/suburban area. Believe it or not there are also still folks who come from cultures where they do not believe in banks in the USA, so there is a lot of cash and gold in those people's homes.

> small-scale crime like this

You mean murder?

If we are doing random predictions based on scant evidence, mine is a professional hit. Neighbor said he heard 3 shots. If it was a "pop pop...pop", that's 2 in the body, 1 in the head. Professional assassin.

My prediction: time traveler. Guy goes back in time to prevent an unspeakable tragedy that happened in the future. The simplest solution to alter the course of human history was this attack. We'll never find the killer because as soon as his work was completed, he vaporized into the ether as his timeline was culled.

Wish that guy had … well, never mind. Better not to say it.

I don't see how it plausibly could be anything else.

It could be a disgruntled grad student? That is shockingly not unheard of in academia.

It’s someone he knew. Either a family member or jilted lover. That’s what it always ends up being.

I would assume that the most likely options for for "rich person shot in home" are:

* Drug dealer

* Cheating on spouse and someone got jealous

* Suicide

* Drug-addled family member with a history of violence.

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