A “calm, intelligent, friendly, hardworking” British international banker fatally shot his wife before killing himself at their American home.
The bodies of Julian Knott, age 45 from London, an executive director of America’s biggest bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co, and his Filipina wife Alita, 47, were found at their hill top £350,000 home in Jefferson Township, New Jersey, 50 miles west of Manhattan, on July 6.
Police said Knott had shot his wife “repeatedly” before turning the same gun on himself.
Press reports quoted Steve Dunk, a vice president at JPMorgan, saying Knott was “calm, intelligent, friendly, hardworking. Julian’s and Alita’s deaths were a tragic, incomprehensible event and they leave behind many, many grieving friends.”
Local New Jersey press reported that “photos on social media suggest a couple as desperately in love as the day they married and a close-knit family enjoying one another on vacations near and far.” The couple were “affluent world travellers who have two teenage sons and a college-age daughter.”
Police were summoned to the house shortly after 1 a.m. Sunday following a report of two unconscious adults. The Knotts were already dead when officers arrived, according to a statement by law enforcement officials. The statement did not say who found the bodies.
Knott started at JPMorgan in 2006 as a network operations manager in London and rose to executive director of the technology network over eight years, according to his LinkedIn profile. He met Alita in the U.K., and they moved to Ohio and then New Jersey as Knott gained responsibility.
The couple met in London 20 years ago when Alita was a personal assistant to a Bahraini sheikh. They married and settled in Southwick, West Sussex, where Mrs Knott opened Quayside Tots Playgroup.
Bloomberg, the financial news service, reports that Deutsche Bank AG, Russell Investments and Zurich Insurance Group AG have also lost employees and former employees to suicide in the past year.
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