the mysterious death of suchir balaji

Disclaimer: this essay is about a tragic and violent death. It's an intense topic. The violence is explained in graphic detail.

It was November 26, 2024. Suchir’s mother, Poornima, hadn’t heard from her son in three days. This was unlike him. She worried something was wrong and called the police for a welfare check.

The SFPD entered Suchir’s apartment in Mint Hill that afternoon. The apartment was a mess, as if it were rummaged through. A half-eaten dinner sat on the desk. A pool of blood seeped from the bathroom door.

The police found his body in the bathroom. A pistol was under his legs, a bullet wound in his forehead. Some blood had splattered into the sink, but most had coagulated in a big puddle next to the door of the bathroom. Suchir's leg was cut badly. His tongue had a hole in the center. The security cameras in the elevator were disabled.1

And, there was a torn piece of a clip-on wig by the bathroom door.

The police took a brief look and immediately ruled it a suicide. After a brief examination, the medical examiner agreed.

Suchir worked at OpenAI until 2024. He then resigned to blow the whistle on the company’s copyright law violations. One month before his death, he did an interview with the New York Times about the violations and agreed to testify as a witness in the NYT lawsuit against the company. The NYT lawsuit was about the OpenAI using copyrighted articles to train its models. It’s still ongoing.

So, one month after Suchir came forward as a whistleblower, he was found dead. Given this context, many saw the timing of the death suspicious. This wouldn’t be the first time that a whistleblower was murdered under the guise of suicide.

I never knew Suchir personally, but we grew up in the same city. He went to my high school. He was two grades below me.

He looks like my friends do. There's a certain Asian genius Mathcounts programmer aesthetic. It's driven and passionate while reasonable and innocent. That resemblance touched something in me and was one reason I was so absorbed by the news.

The other reason was the implications of this not being a suicide. I grew up in the Bay Area and have lived in SF. I’ve met many people who’ve worked on AI and talked about their encounters with people like Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever. From the picture they painted, companies like OpenAI never seemed evil to me. Negligent, sure. But not the kind of companies that would coordinate the murder of an innocent twenty-six year old kid. That seemed very, very, far-fetched.

So when the news of Suchir’s death first came out, I had no reason to question what the news reported and what I saw on my X feed: that Suchir’s death was a tragic example of the excessive mental pressure suffered by whistleblowers.

But months later, I saw Suchir’s mother, Poornima, pop up on my Youtube recommends, giving interviews with people like Patrick Bet-David. I was shocked to learn that Poornima firmly believes Suchir was murdered. I was initially inclined to, as many did, wave her off as a grieving mother who would not accept that her son suffered serious mental health issues.

But as I went deeper into the evidence she presented, I was stunned. The case for murder was extremely compelling. I’ll summarize it for you here. You can make up your own mind:

On November 22nd, 2024, Suchir Balaji returned home to his San Francisco apartment from a birthday trip to Catalina Island with some childhood friends. He called his dad at 5pm. He sounded happy. His dad wished him happy birthday and they made plans to go to CES in a few months.

That call was the last time anyone heard from him.

Suchir DoorDashed his dinner that night. There's security camera footage of him picking up his food. He looks normal.

Then he sat on his laptop until 10:18 p.m, looking up random neuroscience topics.2

After hearing nothing from her son for four days, Suchir's mom called the police for a welfare check on the afternoon of November 26th.

After entering the apartment, the police quickly ruled it a suicide. Suchir had owned a gun.The police concluded that he used it to kill himself. He had a gunshot wound in his forehead. His own gun was laying under his legs. Also, apartment access required a key fob, and the unit’s windows did not open wider than four inches. How could anyone have gotten in? The police and examiner did not wait for the ballistics report. The case seemed closed.

It was only by the disbelief of Suchir's mother that ignored evidence started to come to light. She hired a Private Investigator and continued paying rent for Suchir’s apartment, so that they could continue to uncover details that the police had glossed over. There are many inexplicable omissions in all of the official reports-- the police report, the medical examiner report, and the autopsy report-- that raise important questions.

First, the security camera in the apartment elevator was disconnected for reasons no one could explain. Suchir's mother also discovered there were two entrances to the apartment that were not covered by security cameras. Also, the murderer could have gotten around the key fob access constraint by bribing a staff member for access. The company that owns the apartment complex would not release the key fob access records.

Second, there are so many inexplicable details in the crime scene. Many of these were overlooked and omitted in the official reports. Suchir's apartment looked ransacked— far beyond normal messiness. The dust bin in his bathroom was knocked over, away from where the body fell. His airpods and a single floss pick were strewn across the floor, as if he had been hit while flossing. There are bits of his hair covering is airpods. And, craziest of all, there was a torn piece of a clip-on wig sitting in a pool of blood by his bathroom door. Suchir was not known to wear wigs. And the rest of the wig is no where to be found. No police officer has yet mentioned or commented on the wig.

Also, Suchir had injuries not mentioned by the examiner, autopsy, or police officer. He had a blunt force trauma to the side of his head. His cheekbone was broken. He had a cut on his knee. And, most disturbingly, his tongue had a hole in it.

How did all that happen? Is this really a normal suicide? And why wasn't any of it mentioned? Detailing all the injuries is standard protocol. It's not like they were hard to see. The autopsy report said Suchir would have died instantly. But why, then, did they give no explanation for the other injuries and condition of the apartment, all of which indicate a struggle?

The reports also note a blood alcohol content of .18, but no alcohol was found in his apartment. Did he get drunk on the flight? But how would he have maintained a blood alcohol content of .18 from 4pm to 10pm without drinking at home? It’d be impossible to get that drunk. And again, there's CCTV footage of him picking up his doordash order looking normal. And he called his dad at 5pm.

Could he have been drugged? The toxicology report also indicates a high level of GBL in his system. GBL is a man-made precursor to GHB, a known sedative and often given unknowningly to victims in cases of sexual assault.

Also, the angle of the gun is extremely peculiar. The gun was aimed at the front of his forehead angled steeply downward, towards his C1 vertebrae. The shot completely missed his brain. How common is this angle in suicides? I’d guess highly, highly uncommon. But, it suspiciously matches the scenario of a shooter standing over someone with a gun to their forehead, as they sit or kneel on the ground.

Also, the ballistics report, which Suchir's mom had to fight to obtain, came out negative, meaning that officials could not find any bullets, casings, or markings that would indicate that Suchir's gun had actually fired. Additionally, there’s no blood on the gun, and, no one in the apartment complex heard a gunshot. But Suchir’s gun has no silencer!

Also, in Suchir's mother's privately commissioned analysis of the official CT scan, the doctors identified a potential second bullet lodged in the back of the throat. The likely entrance was the mouth. Did Suchir shoot himself twice? That seems highly unlikely. Suchir's mother makes sure to note that they are open to it not actually being a bullet, but some other metal object. It’s just that she and her radiologist believe it's a bullet because the size matches a bullet. Different doctors may have different opinions. But regardless, what is it? What is that unidentified metal object in his skull? Where would you shoot a whistleblower, if you wanted to send a message?

Finally, the day Suchir went offline, the CCTV in the elevator was unplugged. No one can explain this, and it wasn’t reported by the police. Why was it unplugged? Why did no one mention this?

All of this evidence was only recorded and considered by private investigators hired by Suchir's mother investigators. The city officials have neither mentioned nor commented on any of these things.

Now, is all this conclusive proof that Suchir was murdered? No. But isn't it extremely suspicious? Both the omissions by the official reports and the crime scene itself? At the very least, doesn't the case demand further investigation?

If we were to imagine this as a suicide, the sequence of events would have to be something like this: Suchir comes back from his trip. He eats dinner and is on his laptop until 10:18pm. Then, sometime in the next few days, he does a bunch of GBL and alcohol and somehow gets rid of all the alcohol bottles and GBL (because there's no security cam footage of him going to the trash room). He then destroys his own apartment, gets his gun, puts in his airpods, kicks over his trash can, throws a single floss pick on the ground, somehow cuts his own thigh really badly, then stands in the bathroom entrance, not facing the mirror, shoots himself from that peculiar angle that misses his brain, and collapses in a way that causes the blunt force trauma injury to his head and breaks his cheekbone. Oh, and right as he died he was messing with a clip-on wig that is also no where to be found.

Of course this isn't the only way you can weave together the evidence for the suicide case. But all permutations seem equally uncompelling. To me, it looks like a murder. Maybe there’s a possibility that it’s a suicide. But I believe this case should be re-investigated as a murder.

If we reason about the case for murder, the biggest obstacle is: who would possibly do it? It feels unlikely that OpenAI would hire a hit on anyone, let alone for basic copyright law violations. One possibility is someone at the company that worked with Suchir and was hiding something was both uncertain and concerend how much Suchir actually knew and what he might reveal.

Another possibility is a competitor AI company did it. Maybe a company in a rougher country. The company that wanted to steal trade secrets from Suchir, possibly worth billions of dollars. At best, the murder would look like a suicide. At worst, the timing would make people think OpenAI did it.

I know both of these possibilities may seem far fetched. Too much like a crime thriller and not grounded in mundane reality. But the only reason I’m drawing these speculations is because of the all the other hard, physical, evidence that is impossible to explain.

Whoever carried it out, the sequence of events would have gone something like this: the hitman made arrangements with someone in the apartment staff to get key fob access and disable the elevator security camera. The hitman wore a clip-on wig as a disguise. They entered Suchir's apartment the night of the 22nd. He was flossing with airpods in, getting ready for bed. The killer snuck up behind him and bashed the side of his head. His airpods fell out, he dropped his floss pick, some blood splattered onto the sink and cabinet. There was a struggle and part of the hitman's wig was torn off. The hitman then incapacitated Suchir and force-fed him GBL. Then he stood over Suchir with a gun to his forehead and interrogated him. Then the murderer shot Suchir through the mouth. Then through the forehead.

It’s such a brutal story I’m both enranged and disgusted typing it out. I cannot stomach this happening to anyone. And yet it fits the given evidence much better than the case for suicide.

Despite the scene playing again and again in my head, I can't fathom what it would have been like for him. I imagine him struggling bravely but painfully and my heart goes out to him and his family.

If this was really a murder, the implications are enormous. Behind all the AI world's hyper-reasonable, techno-optimist, neo-buddhist imagery, there lurks evil that we must be deeply wary of. An evil much greater than accidentally replacing workers or driving people crazy. It’s a conscious evil, the kind of evil that motivates and justifies the calculated and deliberate murder of the innocent. The kind of evil that justifies sneaking into the apartment of an innocent and bright-eyed twenty-six year old, bashing his head in while he was flossing, drugging him, interrogating him, then shooting him on the floor. What motivates such evil? What does the murderer know that we don’t? We must always be sober to the possibility that there is evil in high places, and evil involved with this revolutionary technology that will upheave society and redistribute wealth in unpredictable ways. What does that mean for us?

Suchir’s mother, Poornima, is still pursuing the truth. She says she always feels his presence always and is working on legislative reform to create better protections for whistleblowers.

Sources + further investigation

9/14/2025 - Diya TV interview with Suchir’s mother. Discusses the toxicology report and the findings of a private forensic investigator. She goes into many more details and new findings I didn’t include here for the sake of length.

9/10/2025 - Sam Altman on Tucker Carlson. Suchir is discussed at 34m30s. I personally find Sam’s response a bit suspicious. He keeps trying to deflect saying Tucker is not respecting the tragedy and the family. But Tucker was questioning Sam at the behest of Suchir’s mother!

3/26/2025 - Suchir’s mother's interview with Patrick Bet-David. She provides pictures and video of the crime scene, excerpts from the official autopsy report, and excerpts from the analysis of her privately hired investigators.

1/15/2025 - Suchir's mother on Tucker Carlson.

Suchir’s mother on X. It seems that her attorney was lied to about endogenous GHB. I’m no toxicologist, but the official toxicology report also shows a high level of GBL, a level that surely cannot be endogenous.

The medical examiner report.