Bay Area residents Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy lost their only son, Suchir Balaji in November 2024. The 26-year-old, Florida-born, Cupertino-raised AI researcher was found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, just a few days after he returned from a camping trip with his friends. The San Francisco Medical Examiner ruled his death a suicide, but his parents firmly believe that he was murdered.
A prodigious talent turned AI whistleblowe
Suchir Balaji was born to immigrant couple Poornima and Balaji, who moved from India to the United States in 1997. After Suchir was born in Florida, the family moved to Cupertino where Poornima and Balaji built successful careers in tech. Growing up, Suchir also exhibited a prodigious talent for computer science. After completing his undergraduate degree at UC Berkeley, he joined San Francisco-based OpenAI as an AI researcher.
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Over four years, Balaji worked on landmark projects like WebGPT (which morphed into ChatGPT,) before quitting the company in August 2024. In an interview with the New York Times, he revealed that Open AI was violating copyright laws and that was why he quit his job. Shortly before his death, the New York Times listed Balaji as a custodian witness in a lawsuit the paper was bringing against OpenAI.
After his body was found on November 26, the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office ruled it a suicide. However, his parents insist that it was a homicide and that the city should investigate it as such.
“Within 40 minutes, they didn’t look at anything, just quickly they said, ‘Okay, its suicide, we’ll take the body’,” said Ramarao. “They did not even conduct a full autopsy… we had a doubt from the moment they shared the news with us.”
Ramarao and Ramamurthy, who were in regular touch with Suchir before his death, believe that he was murdered and that the authorities’ response is a cover-up. They maintain that their son was not in a dire state of mental health and had in fact, just returned from a camping trip with his friends. They added that the chances of foul play became very strong because he was a whistleblower.
“You see a grieving mother whose resolve is to punish and get justice for her son so that his soul is in peace,” said Ramarao.
“It’s a community’s fight for justice”
When asked about the case, San Francisco Police Department Public Information Officer Paulina Henderson said in an email statement, “Officers and medics arrived on scene and located a deceased adult male from what appeared to be a suicide. No evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation.” Henderson also confirmed that the investigation remains open, but did not share any other details about the same.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner did not respond to a request for a statement about the case.
Two months on from Suchir’s death, his parents are unhappy with the San Francisco city officials’ response so far. They are now calling on Governor Newsom and California Attorney General Rob Bonta to step in, and are also trying to get in touch with the Trump administration to sanction an independent FBI investigation of the case.
“We want a special team to be assigned,” said Ramarao. “We want to dig out the truth, secure a death sentence for the one who murdered my son, and send the one who ordered him to be killed to jail for life.”
Meanwhile, Ramarao and Ramamurthy have also been busy rallying support for Balaji in the Bay Area community. They held a vigil in Milpitas in late December, and intend to conduct more vigils to raise awareness about this case and build pressure on the authorities to investigate the case. Also, they are also circulating an online petition to investigate Suchir’s death and have created a Facebook page to share updates related to the case.
They are appealing to the media and the local community to join their fight for justice. “It’s a community’s fight for justice, it’s our Indian American community which has been wronged here,” said Ramarao. “We can’t be quiet.”