US researcher 'visited suicide websites'
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Police also found anti-depression pills; friends say Todd was not happy
American engineer Shane Todd had visited suicide-related websites on 19 occasions in the four months leading up to his death, senior state counsel Tai Wei Shyong said in his opening statement during the first day of the coroner's inquiry into Todd’s death yesterday.
After finding the 31-year-old hanged in his apartment near Chinatown on June 24 last year, police also discovered 19 pills
containing the anti-depressant Citalopram in his home, Tai said.
Dr Todd was found dead shortly after he quit the Singapore Institute of Microelectronics, which he had joined in 2010. It was his first job after graduating with a doctorate from the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Four witnesses who took the stand yesterday, including his girlfriend Shirley Sarmiento, neighbour Michael Goodwin and friends Ali Miserez and Bart Richard Lendrum, said Todd had been stressed over his work, especially after he had transferred to a new research group in March 2011.
He had confided to his girlfriend that he was unhappy partly because his colleagues were mostly Chinese and they spoke to each other in Mandarin, which he did not understand.
Sarmiento added that Dr Todd had said he was working in a “dishonest environment” and that his boss had “stolen his team’s idea”.
Lendrum said Dr Todd had complained that his co-workers did not work as hard as him and did not meet standards, while Goodwin said Dr Todd had once confessed to dropping a S$10,000 (Bt240,000) piece of equipment in front of his colleagues and being embarrassed by that.
Sarmiento added that Dr Todd had told her on one occasion that there were “heavy hands” coming after him and that he was doing work that could get him into trouble with the United States government.
The inquiry was to resume with police officers expected to take the stand.
