Indian victim spent long hours at work

GPS DEVICE-MAKER Garmin long has revered diversity in its workforce, even when the locale of its ever-sprawling operational headquarters — a largely white Kansas City suburb — didn’t reflect it. It’s the place 32-year-old Srinivas Kuchibhotla came to work a few years ago. By his wife’s account Friday he willingly spent long hours on an aviation systems engineering team alongside Alok Madasani, a friend and colleague also 32 and from India.

Kuchibhotla’s trek led him to have a kinship with his boss, Lebanese native Didier Popadopoulos, who says he moved to America at Kuchibhotla’s age and once held the same Garmin job.

But Garmin — a billion-dollar tech giant launched in Kansas as a startup by two men nearly three decades ago — now is reeling, trying to digest Kuchibhotla’s shooting death.

On Friday, Garmin tried to comfort grieving employees at a closed-door vigil inside the auditorium on its campus in Olathe, Kansas. Kuchibhotla’s widow, Sunayana Dumala, addressed the group of about 200 workers that included Madasani, who was released from the hospital Thursday.

Laurie Minard, Garmin’s vice president of human resources, doesn’t believe the shooting will jeopardise its recruitment of workers from overseas.

“We tend to be a family here,” she said at the Garmin campus. “We want people to feel safe. We embrace it. We encourage it. We support it. It’s extremely important to us about acceptance.”

At any given time, she said, more than 100 Garmin employees are in the H-1B program, which lets American companies bring foreigners with technical skills to the US for three to six years. AP