Independent Autopsy Finds OpenAI Whistleblower's Bullet Wound Was Not Consistent With Suicide
As Decrypt and other outlets report, the 26-year-old whistleblower's parents, Poornima Ramarao and Balaji Ramamurthy, say the independent autopsy they commissioned suggests that the gunshot wound that killed their son was inconsistent with suicide — building on claims they've been making since November that their son was murdered rather than having taken his own life.
In a lawsuit filed against San Francisco and its police department, the grieving parents are now accusing authorities of covering up foul play and demanding they release all files about Balaji's death.
"The lawsuit demands that the city, police department, and medical examiner release public documents withheld under the Public Records Act," the family's attorney Joseph Goethals told Decrypt. If authorities fail to do so expediently, the lawyer said that he would seek a court order to force the issue.
Just a month prior to his body being found in his apartment, the New York Times published a bold claim from the former OpenAI employee: that the company was, in spite of its half-baked insistence to the contrary, using "enormous amounts" of copyrighted materials without permission to train its models. Balaji knew this because he'd help gather said data before ChatGPT was released in November 2022.
Since Balaji's death, the young tech genius' parents have fought for answers, and said they've been met with resistance from SFPD. Police told Ramarao that she couldn't see her son's body because the bullet that killed him had "destroyed" his face, she said — but when independent pathologist Joseph Cohen examined the body, he discovered that that claim appeared to be false.
During that second autopsy, Cohen deduced that the downward and slightly left-to-right trajectory of the single bullet that penetrated Balaji's brainstem would have been unusual for a suicide. He also found a contusion on the back of the young man's head, suggesting, per the suit, that he may have been struck before being shot.
Thus far, authorities in San Francisco have been tight-lipped about the case because it's still open. According to a source with direct knowledge who spoke to Fortune magazine, however, that silence may soon end when police and the city medical examiner's office release letters with "detailed facts" that provide more evidence that the young man killed himself.
Throughout this debacle, Balaji's family hasn't pointed fingers at OpenAI or anyone else. Instead, the grieving parents are insisting that authorities fully investigate the matter — and, hopefully, start to heal from this unimaginable tragedy.
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