Jayandran Palaniappan, a young man from India, worked in bioengineering research at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Funding for this position was about to run out; he’d been fired, because of the bad economy, from some private industry positions before this.
Like Jerry Wolff, a biology professor at St. Cloud State, and like a number of other students and professors UD has covered on this blog, Palaniappan meticulously planned his suicide.
[P]olice have been able to determine that Palaniappan took a shuttle to O’Hare Airport in Chicago, flew to Buffalo, N.Y., and took a shuttle to a Comfort Inn not far from Niagara Falls, all on May 11.
“He apparently walked into the water and went over the falls,” [a policeman] said.
Palaniappan was a runner (Googling his name produces many races in which he took part). Like Wolff, a serious outdoorsman who traveled to and killed himself in a national park (to “return my body and soul to nature,” he wrote in a suicide note), and like Cameron Dabaghi, a Yale athlete who took a train from New Haven to the Empire State Building and, with a running start, cleared a barrier at its top, Palaniappan seems to have chosen his form of suicide with great care, to reflect in some way his philosophy of life. All three men journeyed to iconic locations and then, in a last burst of physical vigor, ran off the face of the earth.