View the San Francisco for Thursday, January 23, 2025
Poornima Ramarao, right, and her husband, Balaji Ramamurthy, hold a photo of their son, Suchir Balaji, outside their home in Union City. Balaji, a former employee of OpenAI, was found dead in his San Francisco home on Nov.
26. To Poornima Ramarao, it has been clear since the moment she found out about the death of her son, OpenAI whistleblower Suchir Balaji, that he didn’t kill himself. Since that day — Nov. 26 — Ramarao and her husband, Balaji Ramamurthy, have questioned the San Francisco medical examiner’sand have been calling for a full investigation into her son’s death. Ramarao has also repeatedly charged that her son was murdered and accused city officials of covering up the circumstances of his death. The “only thing that keeps us going is we have to get justice him,” Ramarao told The Examiner in a recent interview. “We want people to know” the facts about Balaji’s case, she said, “and we want an investigation to open.” In recent weeks, their pleas and suspicions have begun to be echoed by some powerful people, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, right-wing provocateur and news host Tucker Carlson, Silicon Valley Rep. Ro Khanna and San Francisco Supervisor Jackie Fielder.into the death by the FBI or appropriate agency,” Khanna said last week in a post on X directed at Ramarao.“I’m concerned about the circumstances surrounding Suchir’s death, which is why I think it needs a deeper investigation,” she said.Jackie Fielder speaking with a voter inside a diner during her successful bid to win the 2024 election for District 9 supervisor. For now, any inquiry into Balaji’s death remains at the local level, although San Francisco officials to date have released no information to support their conclusion his death was a suicide. The San Francisco Police Department’s investigation into Balaji’s death remains open and active, department spokesperson Officer Paulina Henderson said in an email. Because of that, the police declined to release a copy of the incident report regarding the death. Likewise, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner has not yet completed or released its forensic report, according to David Serrano Sewell, the office’s executive director. On its website, the office says it seeks to release such reports within 90 days of a person’s death. Balaji died Nov. 22, or about 60 days ago, according to Ramarao. An OpenAI representative did not respond to a request for comment about the calls for a wider inquiry or Ramarao’s accusation that he was killed because of his whistleblowing activity. Ramarao said she was outside Balaji’s San Francisco apartment when the police came at her request on Nov. 26 to do a wellness check on her son. She and her husband hadn’t heard from him since Nov. 22, she said, and he didn’t answer or return her call the following day. When she went to his apartment from her home in Union City on Nov. 25, he didn’t open the door when she knocked. When she called later that day and asked police to do a wellness check, they told her a parent needed to be present before they could open his door, she said. She said she filed a missing person complaint in Union City the next day, then went back to San Francisco and waited for the police to arrive. After they came and went into the apartment, Ramarao waited for someone to tell her what was going on. At that point, she hoped to hear that he wasn’t there, that he was off on a trip and just didn’t want to talk or had lost his cell phone, she said. The “last thing we were expecting” was that he was dead, she said. But when a vehicle that wasn’t an ambulance drove up with a stretcher, “my heart sank,” she said. Former OpenAI employee Suchir Balaji helped gather and organize the data used to train the startup’s ChatGPT chatbot. The team from the medical examiner’s office spent about 40 minutes in Balaji’s apartment, Ramarao said. At 4 p.m., they gave her the keys to the apartment and told her she could collect her son’s body the following day, she told Carlson.The Chief Medical Examiner’s Office did release Balaji’s body the next day, but it hadn’t done a “proper” autopsy, she said in her interview with Carlson. Ramarao and her husband immediately commissioned a second autopsy from Dr. Joseph Cohen that raised doubts about the medical examiner’s determination of suicide, she told The Examiner. The trajectory the bullet took was atypical of a suicide, she said. The bullet took a diagonal path from Balaji’s forehead down through the base of his head, missing his brain, she said. The second autopsy also found an injury on the left side of her son’s head, potentially indicating he had been assaulted before he was killed, she said. Ramarao declined to provide The Examiner with a copy of the second autopsy report. Cohen did not respond to a request for comment. She also hired a crime-scene investigator to take a look at the evidence in Balaji’s apartment, she said. A second investigator assessed pictures taken from the scene and raised his own questions about how her son died, saying there was reason to believe Balaji might have been killed. The investigator, Dr. Dinesh Rao of Jamaica, called for a reexamination of Balaji’s apartment. “The crime scene examination is in adequate and incomplete and unscientific,” Rao said in his report, which Ramarao shared with The Examiner.Ramarao cited numerous other reasons why she doesn’t believe her son killed himself and said she’s dubious of the initial inquiry conducted by city investigators. One of her primary reasons is his mental state. Balaji didn’t leave a suicide note and didn’t seem depressed in the days and weeks leading up to his death, she and her husband said. From his computer, they could see that he was browsing the web up until 10 p.m. on the night he died, she told Carlson. The last site he visited involved research on neuroscience, she told Carlson. Ramarao said she spoke with Balaji on the morning of Nov. 21 — his 26th birthday. Ramamurthy said he spoke with Balaji the next day, after Balaji returned from a more than weeklong trip to the Catalina Islands with some old friends.One of Balaji’s friends, who was with him on the trip, echoed that. Balaji at times seemed to be deep in thought on the trip and went on a walk by himself one morning, said the friend, who asked not to be named for fear of being doxed by online conspiracy theorists. But that wasn’t unusual behavior for Balaji, the friend said. “I didn’t really notice anything out of the ordinary,” said the friend, who said he had been close to Balaji since middle school. “He was pretty much the same still, cracking jokes. He seemed like a good mood.”Sam Altman is CEO of San Francisco-based OpenAI, which was accused in a lawsuit filed by The New York Times in December 2023 of breaking copyright laws when it was collecting data to train the model underlying its ChatGPT chatbot. Suchir Balaji had been named as a witness in the lawsuit. Balaji left OpenAI in August. In October, The New York Times published an interview with him in which he accused the San Francisco-based artificial-intelligence giant ofwhen it was collecting data to train the model underlying its ChatGPT chatbot. In November, days before Balaji’s death, lawyers for the newspaper named Balaji as a witness in its copyright-infringement lawsuit against OpenAI. Friends and family members told The Examiner that Balaji didn’t seem anxious about leaving his job or being a whistleblower. They also said he was making plans for the future, possibly to go back to school to get his Ph.D. or to launch his own AI startup. “From what I could tell, he was excited about what the future had, and I think he wanted to explore a lot of his interesting ideas, and he kind of felt some freedom to do that,” said a second friend who said he had known Balaji since high school. “I would be very surprised if it were a suicide,” said the second friend, who asked not to be named for fear of being harassed or impairing their job prospects in the tech industry. The person said they had spoken with 10 other friends of Balaji who felt similarly about his death. That said, Ramarao acknowledged that Balaji had owned a gun since January. And both friends and family members said he kept things close to the vest, rarely talking about his feelings or his intentions. His parents and friends didn’t know he had spoken with The Times until it published his article about him, they said. Nor did they know he was going to be a witness in the New York Times case against OpenAI, Ramarao said. Even his closest friends said he didn’t talk with them about why he was thinking of leaving OpenAI until he left, they said. “He kept things to himself. That was one of the problems,” Ramarao told The Examiner. “He was very secretive.”City Attorney David Chiu: “Essentially, what this is going to do is it’ll deny some children the same basic rights that other children in our country have, which will create a permanent multigenerational underclass.” San Francisco joined a coalition of states Tuesday in one of two lawsuits that aims to block President Donald Trump’s attempts toAfter Trump signed the order, San Francisco and nearly two dozen state attorneys general swiftly took legal action to oppose Trump, who would not grant citizenship to those born to mothers who lack legal status in the United States or are here on a temporary basis. The City joined 18 state attorneys general suing Trump in a Massachusetts federal court, while four other states are suing Trump in Washington state. The legal battle about to ensue is especially pertinent in San Francisco, where the percentage of residents who are foreign-born typically exceeds 33%. The Examiner sat down with San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu hours after the lawsuit was filed Tuesday to discuss its merits, his office’s reactions to Trump’s bevy of executive orders and The City’s place in history. This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Why was it important for you that the city join this lawsuit given that there’s 18 states already involved? The story of birthright citizenship is as San Francisco as they come. San Francisco has a unique connection with the constitutional principle of birthright citizenship, because one of our own citizens in the late 1800s stood up for his constitutional rights. Wong Kim Ark was born in San Francisco on Sacramento Street to immigrant parents. In 1895, he was traveling back from China to his home in San Francisco when he was detained, ostensibly under the Chinese Exclusion Act. It happened during an anti-immigrant era with significant anti-Chinese bigotry. Despite the era and the anti-Asian bigotry and the fact that it was the U.S. Solicitor General who was prosecuting his case, he had the courage to stand up for his rights. He prevailed. That’s the historical connection to this issue. Can you articulate the present consequences should this be carried out? This issue is personal to me as the first child born to my immigrant parents. Birthright citizenship is personal to a large majority of San Franciscans who are either immigrants or children of immigrants. This is going to be harmful to our economy as well as create intense chaos for so many in our communities. The executive order is going to result in a significant loss of federal funding to local governments like San Francisco. For example, San Francisco is responsible for administering federal-state-funded public benefit programs like CalWORKS and CalFresh. We receive funding based in part on the number of eligible recipients, and eligibility is determined by having a valid Social Security number. So without Social Security numbers, we can’t verify otherwise-eligible newborns who may qualify for these programs. So this executive order is going to result in the direct loss of federal funding to San Francisco to provide aid and administer these programs, and without that funding, we still have to bear the inherent costs of caring for our residents. Overturning this 127-year-old legal precedent is a ruthless attack on our newborns and future generations of Americans. Ending birthright citizenship will impede their integration and assimilation into society, their educational future, which hurts all of us. Essentially, what this is going to do is it’ll deny some children the same basic rights that other children in our country have, which will create a permanent multigenerational underclass of those who will have been born in the U.S., but will have never lived anywhere else and will effectively be stateless. These are children who won’t be able to naturalize or obtain citizenship from another country. They’ll live under constant threat of deportation, and as they age, they won’t be able to work legally or vote. They’ll have limited ability to travel and will be challenged in accessing health care. So there’s a whole parade of horribles that will happen for this class of citizens.President Donald Trump signs an executive order on birthright citizenship — which was immediately challenged in court — in the Oval Office of the White House on Monday. The is that you’re demonstrating that these people are a drain on public resources. San Francisco being a city with a large immigrant population, do you feel that there is any truth to that claim?. At this moment they are citizens who are paying their taxes, and we know that immigrants provide much more in taxes than they are taking away as far as services, but it will increase our costs. Have you spoken with Mayor Lurie about this action at all? Do you feel like you’re in lockstep with the administration, or no?Are any other executive orders, or any other actions taken of the many yesterday that President Trump took, that your office is keeping an eye on, or potentially reacting to? As you can imagine, my lawyers have been frantically reviewing and analyzing since they’ve been coming out. There’s a lot of language and in many executive orders that we’re concerned about and monitoring. Many of the executive orders instruct his agencies and cabinet secretaries to start doing things and to start collecting data, which will likely lead to actions that we may need to defend our city against. So it’s premature to say at this moment, but so many of our communities are under threat because of the first round of the executive orders issued yesterday. OurIt is a battle that we’ve fought before and we’ll likely have to fight again. That language certainly caught our eye and has been a topic of discussion in the last 24 hours, and we will certainly monitor what the attorney general and the head of Homeland Security decide to do with that., and could continue to do in the coming weeks, months, years, what capacity does your office have to absorb all of it, interpret all of it, you know?to bolster the bulwarks of California in this space and are very supportive of the $50 million that the legislature and the governor will be providing to our attorney general and legal nonprofit organizations that are defending immigrants. But at this moment, we do not yet have assurances that we’ll be receiving funds, so we are in conversations as we speak with legislators to see if that can change. I am the chair of the California Civil Prosecutors Coalition, which comprises the largest city attorney and county counsel offices in the state. Many of us were deeply involved in defending our cities and counties against Trump 1.0 and have geared up again, and we all need resources.City Attorney David Chiu said he’s hoping to receive funding from Gov. Gavin Newsom, left — seen with California Attorney General Rob Bonta — and the state to support his office’s legal efforts. I am repeating myself, but why is it important that San Francisco as a city take action in these cases, instead of just allowing the attorney general of California to to take that on? Donald Trump has threatened to target local programs, and local institutions, including public hospitals, local law enforcement, local grants and funding that only San Francisco has the standing to defend in court. So there will be plenty of times when we’ll work lockstep with our attorney general. There’ll be plenty of times when AG Bonta can act to protect us, but there will also be times when we will need to stand up for ourselves. How are you feeling, in terms of confidence, about the merit of the case that you’re bringing against President Trump? Extremely confident. This is constitutional bedrock, based in the 14th Amendment that has been constitutional precedent for 127 years. We are optimistic that any judge who looks at this will agree with us. Are you concerned by the ways in which “Trump 1.0” was successful at reshaping the judiciary in his image and that it might be a different set of judges?sitting on the federal judiciary — but all of them swore to take an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. There could not be a more clear example of an embedded constitutional principle. Yet another San Francisco lawmaker is poised to begin playing a leading role in California housing politics. Assemblymember Matt Haney — who represents The City’s eastern half — will chair the Assembly Committee on Housing and Human Development, which operates as a legislative gatekeeper for bills related to housing. The position could prove to be highly influential as this year’s legislative session gets under way, given that leadership in both the California State Assembly and Senate have said they plan to placeThe appointment could also continue a longtime trend that has seen representatives from the Bay Area play an outsized role in shaping California housing policy, including most notablyAnd Haney noted the state’s housing problems will likely be exacerbated by the deadly wildfires that erupted this month in Los Angeles County. The fires have ripped through residential neighborhoods, killing more than two dozen people and destroying thousands of structures, including many homes.further and further behind on ambitious state-mandated building targets as the construction industry continues to face economic headwinds unleashed by the COVID-19 pandemic, Haney said he believes there is still considerable work for the state left to be done. What’s more, the state reform measures passed so far — including measures to streamline building-permit approvals as well as laws that ratchet up pressure on cities to allow more construction — have been “the easy part,” Haney said. “Actually making sure it happens and being honest about when it’s not happening is where the much more aggressive and robust efforts will be needed,” he said.The assemblymember laid out the rest of his housing vision in a wide-ranging interview with The Examiner, during which he made the case that the state still must do more to cut down on bureaucratic barriers facing housing development and offer additional incentives to struggling jurisdictions. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.Assemblymember Matt Haney riding in the second annual Juneteenth Parade & Festival along Market Street in San Francisco on Saturday, June 8, 2024. In some ways, this committee appointment might have been seen as an unlikely role for you to hold. Before you were elected to become District 6 Supervisor in 2018 , some inviewed you with some suspicion, given your prior opposition to a number of housing projects and measures. But since then you have emerged as a housing champion, and won the endorsement of housing advocates during your 2022 Assembly bid. What can you say about how your thinking on housing has evolved over the years? Well, I was always very strongly for building housing in the area I represented. We built more housing in the supervisor district I represented than anywhere else in The City, and more than many of the other districts combined. But what I saw as a supervisor really helped to formulate the views I have now, which is I really don’t believe that if you just leave each neighborhood or even city on their own within the current laws, that they’ll build the housing at all levels that we need. If you zoom out — both in San Francisco and then across the state — you see a lot of areas that have said “no” to housing all together, and that’s exacerbated our housing crisis. And that’s happened not only because of bureaucracy and red tape, but also because of a total lack of accountability and decentralization of housing decisions. I experienced that firsthand representing downtown San Francisco and looked around at some of my colleagues who represented supervisor districts that had built no housing at all for many years, and sometimes the things I heard them say felt simply like excuses as to why they didn’t plan to do anything. I was upset on behalf of my district — to be the area of The City that was shouldering much of the responsibility. I’m definitely a believer in local input and community input — and there are certain areas that absolutely do need protection — but it’s not acceptable to allow so many parts of our state to be no-go zones for housing. You talk about the red tape; you talk about the excess bureaucracy that gets in the way of housing. Obviously, the state has been passing a lot of measures over the past five to seven years or so to attempt to address those issues. What, in your view, is still left to be done? The steps that have been taken over the last few years were an important start, but it’s really only the first set of steps and only helped us put in place a framework of accountability, of reduced barriers and of goals that now we have to see through. We also have to assess and adapt as it goes on. There are some that put plans on paper to build housing, and nothing’s happened so far. And so we need to go and look at how much of that is and how much of it is continued barriers, whether that’s in needed zoning reform or permitting reform, or some other changes to make these projects happen. I think we haven’t gone far enough on the red tape around permitting reform, particularly in areas where we really want to incentivize building, like infill development and near transit. area where I think that we need to be much more aggressive and realistic is in tax reforms and incentives. A lot of the housing development that occurred in past decades had some level of state or federal support, either in redevelopment or certain types of tax incentives. Building housing quickly and building it for a broad set of income levels is one of the most urgent public priorities we have, so we should act like it in how we incentivize the types of development that we desperately need.Super Beaver Moonrise over the San Francisco skyline and the “Painted Ladies” Victorian houses at Alamo Square in San Francisco on Friday, Nov. 15, 2024. Speaking of the need for more funding, the same logic might be applied to affordable-housing projects . Many in San Francisco’s affordable-housing sector have been saying that they are worried that the, potentially making a large number of affordable projects no longer viable. They’re hoping the state will step in to help. Is this something that is on your agenda? Well, the potential cuts from the federal government are deeply concerning, and could potentially be catastrophic. So I absolutely support a bigger role for the state in affordable housing. I supported that before the threat of federal cuts, and certainly would support that now.. And I’ll be working to restore any cuts that have been proposed in the state budget. [In the face of a soaring state deficit, last year’s June budget deal included more than We’ve asked the cities to get a lot of housing built, including a lot of housing available to people with lower or middle incomes. That’s critical, but that also means we’ve got to provide a way for them to finance that. And either that means state dollars or it means new opportunities for local financing that don’t exist right now. So I’m looking at how to support both of those. While, historically, San Francisco has been seen as one of the most difficult places to build housing in California, some local leaders — including former Mayor London Breed — have enthusiastically joined in the state’s reform effort, putting in place a number of local measures that seem to have succeeded in significantly cutting down on approval times for new projects. In your estimation, has The City turned over a new leaf on its approach to housing? Well, I do think San Francisco has taken some positive steps, but there are clearly more to be taken around zoning, increasing density, permitting reform and in local investments. I don’t think anybody should be happy with the level of actual building or new projects in San Francisco right now: it’s abysmal. But they have made some important changes, and there’s a new mayor, and we should give them an opportunity to see through the ultimate goal, which is more housing. One of the things I really want to focus on is, yes, accountability, but also serious and honest assessment. What’s going on in each of these cities? Are they building housing? And if not, why not? At this point, even after some of the changes that we’ve sought and some of the planning we demanded, if housing is not still not being built, that requires a true, full and honest assessment — and from an assessment, aggressive action.Click and hold your mouse button on the page to select the area you wish to save or print. You can click and drag the clipping box to move it or click and drag in the bottom right corner to resize it. When you're happy with your selection, click the checkmark icon next to the clipping area to continue.This is the name that will be displayed next to your photo for comments, blog posts, and more. 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