The last time I checked — when the United States suffered massive job loss and a recession as the dotcom boom ended in 2000 — immigrant Indians didn’t kill their families or themselves because of financial distress. Many packed their bags, parked their leased BMWs at airports, defaulting on their car loans, and took flights back to their homes in India. Some others just violated their visas, worked illegally at grocery stores and waited out the recession.

So, why are we so eager to find distressed family murders this time around? It is kind of like the farmer suicides in India that people were eager to link with indebtedness, even when the evidence pointed to much more.

Last week, when an Indian family of three – two children and their mother — was found brutally murdered in Detroit, the missing father of the children became a suspect because he had apparently lost his job in recent weeks and his car had been taken away by his creditors.

But Lakshminivasa Rao Nerusu, 42, wasn’t seen as a suspect in Detroit and the killings were not linked to the global financial meltdown. Local police said they only wanted to interview him about the particularly brutal killings, all with a knife.

“While a motive for the crime is unknown...officials believe the killer or killers knew the family because there was no sign of forced entry and the doors to the apartment were locked,” the Detroit Free Press reported. “No one in the neighborhood…heard any fighting or struggle although Jayalakshmi Nerusu — a stay-at-home mother — had defensive wounds,” it added.

This eagerness to link violent crimes such as these to the financial crisis started last month with the Los Angeles killings, where the evidence was stronger but by no means conclusive.

Karthik Rajaram, an engineer, killed his three teenaged children, wife and mother-in-law before turning the gun on himself. It was a clinical performance — clean, efficient and quiet, something you would have expected from an IIT engineer. He even remembered to leave three letters — one to the police, blaming his actions on “economic hardships;” a second to family friends and the third containing a will and testament

So, what gives?

Rajaram was not the typical Indian engineer in the US struggling to raise a family. He was way too successful. He may have aced the GMAT, according to an associate, and once earned $1.2 million as a partner in a London-based venture fund. The point is: He possessed the skills and the connections to survive the present downturn and again succeed.

But he also may have suffered from emotional problems that preceded by many years the current financial turmoil.

“He had some behavioral problems,” Greg Robinson, an entrepreneur and founder of several companies, at Azur Partners LLC, a management consulting agency, told India West, an Indian weekly in California. “He wasn't reliable… He was not an emotionally stable person. It was a real problem and would affect any business he was involved in,” added Robinson, who fired Rajaram from Azur. Robinson might have known Rajaram better than many because he had also previously worked with the Indian at PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Obviously, there are no sureshot answers in the case of Rajaram, or as yet in the case of the Nerusus.