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The first responders crowded in the harsh light of the doorway of Suchir Balaji’s San Francisco apartment. It was Nov. 26, 2024, and nobody had heard from Balaji for days. His mother paced outside the building, worried but not expecting the worst — could the firefighters check if his toiletries were in the bathroom? He might be traveling.
The team breached the door of the Hayes Valley apartment. The smell of death flooded the hallway.
“Is there any chance of … yeah, no,” a police officer said, in bodycam footage newly obtained by The Standard. Balaji’s body was in the bathroom, with a bullet wound to the forehead.
The five men in the apartment — three firefighters, a cop, and a property manager — could not have known the magnitude of what they had just discovered. The gruesome facts of Balaji’s death, which the San Francisco medical examiner ruled a suicide the same day, would soon litter the internet and attract the attention of tech titans and members of Congress, fueling an obsessive cycle of online scrutiny and conspiracy.
Every skeptic has a theory about how Balaji died. These alternate narratives all hinge on two beliefs: that the gifted 26-year-old engineer would not, in fact could not, have killed himself; and that a month before...
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