Loner's Rage Burned After Ruin of Web Site

By Scott Hiaasen and John Mangels
Cleveland Plain Dealer
May 11, 2003

Biswanath Halder's Web site was his life. Working at least eight hours a day year-round in the Case Western Reserve University computer lab, he painstakingly compiled the digital equivalent of a bulging file cabinet and hope chest, stuffed with business plans and pleas for social justice.

Then, three years ago, a prankster hacked into his computer and erased it all. "Everything I had was destroyed," he said. Halder's outrage turned into a blizzard of complaints, from the courts to the FBI and Capitol Hill. He blamed the university and a computer lab assistant named Shawn Miller - "the evil man," as Halder called him.

In Tragedy, Racists Find Common Cause Biswanath Halder, a 62-year-old Indian American, allegedly killed a graduate student and injured two other people during a seven-hour standoff at Case Western Reserve University's business school on Friday. By Saturday night, the following comments had been posted in the guestbook on Halder's Web site: (Sunday 05/11/2003 2:18:35am) Hey, everyone's a winner here. Some wackaloon from India comes here and shoots up a college full of liberal idiots. My regret is that he didn't take out more of them. This is yet another reason why we need to close the borders, why we need to quit giving student visas to kids from third world countries, and why parents should never send their kids to CWRU or any other Marxist commie college. Maybe this will be the wake-up call America needs. In the meantime, enjoy American prison, Apu, or whatever the hell your name is. I can guarantee you that had you done this in India, you'd be rotting in a teeny tiny cell with a dirt floor and nine cellmates, and living off dirty water and cockroaches for the rest of your life. And getting daily beatings from the guards. The fact that this sub-human WON'T be subject to sub-human conditions in prison is what makes this country both great and pathetic. He may even get some bleeding heart, limp-wristed aged hippy liberal lawyer, a CWRU grad maybe, to get him off on some technicality. Just imagine, all you airheads who marched to Free Mumia, now one of your own is dead; will you call for justice? Maybe you will, but it won't change you. You'll still be a bunch of anti-American, anti-Caucasian, anti-Christian, anti-male hypocrites. Just remember one thing: this is how 90% of America thinks. The opinion of the far-left and the opinion of the student body at CWRU is completely worthless. No one in any position of power will ever agree with you, and no one who shares your mindset will ever again be in power. God bless America. (Saturday 05/10/2003 10:17:59pm) Seeeeem-seeem solabeen! The spirts are about to speak. Are they friendly spirts? WATCHHHHHH THIS... All you cow loving stinky faggot Muslims should be taken out and shot on site and piled in the INDIAN OCEAN! Eat BEEF and DIE! (Saturday 05/10/2003 9:35:33pm) another mud skinned immigrant , his brain infected by liberal diseases . a brilliant example of diversity , throw them out of the country. (Saturday 05/10/2003 9:02:54pm) Hello My name is Biswanath Halder, I like to thank all Americans to let me come to their country, get my H-1B, shoot everybody on site, and take all the good jobs. And I love curry and fucking camels up the ass. I love black hair Indians, with the viels over their face, I have 12 children, we need to be at 2.0 billion indians in the world. THanks for letting me take your jobs, and for the target practice! I love America!!! (Saturday 05/10/2003 8:20:32pm)  Embarrass myself? This basmati rice eating motherfucker took a gun and KILLED People and you are worried about ME EMBARRISING MYSELF? This stupid ass H1B got his job cus he was from INDIA. No immigration = no dead students. It’s that SIMPLE, CLOSE THE BORDERS AND NO MORE H1B Job suckers. He is a disgrace to ALL Indians and ALL of the policies that ever allowed him to come to MY COUNTRY. We should close our borders to everyone outside the country. This is one more piece of proof. When are we going to start shipping this foreign human excrement back to their sand dunes? What will our government do? They will ban more guns to make the sheep feel safer, Meanwhile there is another Biswanath Halder out there sucking up another job and potentially another life when he goes nuts. GET THEM ALL THE HELL OUT! (Saturday 05/10/2003 8:03:20pm)  I am a militant Islamic Indian. Allah Akbar. I love Osoma and Saddam! Praise be to my ass and my mom the sacred cow! (Saturday 05/10/2003 7:57:41pm)  I hope this bastard gets killed in jail. That or I hope someone butt rapes his ass till it bleeds. And to the asshole that made a comment about guns.. WRONG This Indian dot head was a anti war anti gun asshole who STOLE His weapons when he felt he "needed" guns. isnt it like a leftist to take from others. (Saturday 05/10/2003 7:57:37pm) Now we see what type of scumbag you ALL are. Your prison sentance should be having to eat hamburger made from the stupid cow that your whore mother worships to in HELL!!! May the flies from a thousand piles of dead hindu scumbags infest your anal canal after you are raped daily in prison!! (Saturday 05/10/2003 7:12:08pm)  Regarding the notion that everyone is the same, the fact of the matter is that India has the highest incidence of TB in the world and continues to do little about it. 1,000 people die in India each day from TB. Rather than solve the problems in their back yard, these mutants come here and bring their germs, viruses, and completely fucked-up shit with them. Close the borders and send the mutants home! (Saturday 05/10/2003 6:30:27pm) Why is it always so easy to guess that this type of thing is done by a mutant from one of the more obnoxious foreign countries? Mutants who do not even have the sense shut-down their silly web sites before they berserk! Close all the borders and send these mutants back to their homelands, and let them wreak havoc there, not here! (Saturday 05/10/2003 4:52:40pm)  We should close our borders to everyone outside the country. This is one more piece of proof. When are we going to start shipping this foreign human excrement back to their sand dunes? (Saturday 05/10/2003 4:31:28pm) Have fun in prison where you belong. Now I can have my job back. One down, another billion to go. Fuck you, you slimy H1B... thanks for showing the world what H1Bs really are.

Halder sued Miller, but a judge dismissed the case. Two weeks ago, an appeals court refused to review it. On Friday, police say, the 62-year-old Calcutta, India, native stalked through Miller's workplace at the CWRU business school, firing a pistol and a machine gun in a seven-hour standoff that ended with one dead and three people, including Halder, wounded.

Police believe Halder's grievance with the school inspired the shooting.

Miller, 38, who was in the Lewis Building on Friday, never got a good look at the shooter, but said yesterday that "about the third or fourth hour, I started to wonder, 'Oh, wow, gee, what if it was him?' "

Court records, interviews and Halder's writings show that the bachelor led a life of awkward isolation while creating an Internet persona of a budding millionaire and social activist, even a savior of the world. There were plenty of contradictions.

He bragged in a deposition from his lawsuit against Miller that his Web-based business plan would "have an impact of billions of dollars a year on mankind," though Halder himself was borrowing from one credit card to pay off another.

He posted an Internet resume seeking jobs as an engineer, yet had sued many potential employers for not hiring him. He has not held a job since at least 1990, instead devoting himself "365 days a year" to establishing a vague "electronic network" of enterprising Indians - a venture he blamed Miller for destroying.

"In a few seconds, the evil man wiped out everything that it took my lifetime to create," Halder said in an e-mail sent to the entire Weatherhead School of Management in August 2000. "Now, the evil man is on his evil path to destroy Weatherhead."

According to his resume, Halder served in the Indian army and received a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Calcutta. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1969 and became a U.S. citizen 11 years later. He lived in New York, Boston and Maryland before moving to Cleveland about 1996.

During the 1970s, he filed numerous unsuccessful discrimination and civil rights cases against big companies like NCR and Sperry Rand, who he said refused to hire him. He said the companies paid off the judges to defeat him.

In his resume, Halder claims he worked as a stockbroker and a real-estate salesman, though in a July 2002 deposition Halder said his last job was as a contract employee for IBM in the late 1980s. At about the same time, he said he began collecting Social Security for various disabilities, including an injured hip and wrist, elbow problems and glaucoma. He underwent psychological tests, but when pressed by Miller's lawyer, he said that had nothing to do with his $600-a-month government check.

Halder received a master's in business administration from CWRU in 1999, but continued to take classes sporadically, apparently to maintain his privileges in the computer lab.

Neighbors within sight of his third-floor housetop apartment in Little Italy, with its front windows covered with aluminum foil, describe a classic loner who rarely spoke and walked down the middle of Coltman Road pulling a grocery cart filled with books.

Halder himself said he tried "to avoid everybody. I do not talk to anybody unless I have to."

"I never really had a lengthy conversation with him," said Jared Oakes, a CWRU law school student who lived in the apartment downstairs. "He'd say, 'Do you have clothes in the dryer?' "

Halder's problems at CWRU began in June 2000, when a visitor to his Web site left a mocking message: "Bizzy Halder is a moron. This guy makes a living out of creeping people out. From his fake hair, to his fake teeth, his whitey tighty shorts and pants. . . . this guy is LOON."

A month later, someone Halder described as a hacker deleted his Web site files. Halder was convinced the culprit was Shawn Miller. He first complained to CWRU's administration, then to the University Circle police.

When they didn't respond, he went to the Cleveland police, the FBI, and even named Miller in letters to the Senate and House judiciary committees.

Miller has denied doing anything to Halder's computer files. Miller's lawyer argued that Halder focused on Miller because the lab assistant told Halder his computer privileges were suspended.

In fact, Halder's computer access was taken away more than once. In 1999, the university shut down his computer account for upsetting a female lab worker, records show. And in November 2001, an associate dean said Halder "harassed and disrupted other users" in the computer lab.

Halder aspired to use his Web site to promote social good as well as to make money. "I try to solve mankind's problems through the Internet," he said in his deposition.

"He's a very vocal social activist," said Durga Choudhury, a New Hampshire engineer who designed a portion of Halder's Web site when both men lived in Boston in the 1990s. "He speaks up for depressed people all over. He was opposing the war in Iraq, Pakistan-sponsored terrorism in India."

The loss of the Web site, and his intensifying anger toward CWRU, derailed whatever plans Halder had.

He spent the rest of that year rebuilding his computer files, finding a lawyer and obsessing about Miller.

"If the unholy trio of an incompetent police department, a perfect idiot mayor, and a felon clerk of the council continue to rule Cleveland, very dark days are ahead for Clevelanders," Halder wrote to then-Mayor Michael White in 2001 after the police wouldn't respond to his complaints about Miller.

As more time passed, his warnings became more dire. In a July 2002 letter to Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge John Sutula, who was overseeing the Miller lawsuit, Halder wrote: