WALNUT CREEK — Two promising students — one a freshman at San Diego State and the other who studied engineering at Stanford University — died Tuesday in what police said looked like a murder-suicide in a home just north of Ygnacio Valley Road.
Clare Orton, a 19-year-old majoring in environmental engineering in San Diego, was found dead in her parents’ Walnut Creek home off Homestead Avenue. Also there was the body of Scott Bertics, a 21-year-old Lafayette resident who had attended Stanford.
Police called to the neighborhood around 6:50 a.m. said they found the two dead from gunshot wounds inside a home on Holton Court.
The two knew each other and had dated, police said.
She had graduated from Las Lomas High School in 2014 and he from Acalanes in Lafayette in 2012. Both were interested in engineering and both were long distance runners on the track teams at their high schools.
Orton’s family lived in the home for more than 10 years, said neighbor Linda Darnsteadt.
The “very pleasant” college student was visiting her home for the summer break from San Diego State, where she had completed her first year, Darnsteadt said.
“I’m just so sad. That’s so tragic,” she said.
Darnsteadt and her husband Gary said that they did not hear gunshots.
“We knew something tragic had happened, but we didn’t know what,” Linda Darnsteadt said. Police cars filled the cul-de-sac until noonOrton was an honors student at San Diego State, according to a school merit page. Her Facebook page includes a reference to membership in the Society of Women Engineers at San Diego State and to the Eco-Action Club at Las Lomas High School in Walnut Creek.
For a photo of a rainbow posted on her Facebook page, she wrote, “When the sunrise is underwhelming, turn around, you may see a double rainbow.”
Bertics was on leave of absence from Stanford and last attended the school in the fall of 2014, a school spokesman said.
Stanford’s website lists Bertics as a member of a team that in 2013 worked on project called “Controlling Robot Dynamics with Spiking Neurons.” He is also credited in a 2014 paper by some of the same team members for developing the driver interface in a project titled: “Controlling Articulated Robots in Task-Space with Spiking Silicon Neurons.”
A 2011 Github entry shows his pleasure at winning an animation code award. “I wrote this program during the summer quarter in 2011 and it won the Stanford CS106A graphics contest!”
Bertics also had a YouTube channel called “sbertics” on which he put videos of his projects, but the newest videos were of glider flights over Oahu in Hawaii. His electronic device videos were three years old.
Walnut Creek police would like to hear from anyone who might have information about what happened. They can be reached at 925-943-5844.
