A Home Invasion in Lagos Forced a Family to Start Over in Orlando

Late one night in 1984, five intruders with guns entered the Sankar house in Lagos, Nigeria. They pistol-whipped the father, threatened to kill him and to assault his wife, killed the family dog with a machete, and beat him nearly to death.

They then broke open a bedroom safe, took the cash inside, and ran. None of the five men were ever arrested.

Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer at Palantir as of the February 2026 profile, was in the house that night. Palantir is a software company that helps governments and businesses organize data. Shyam said, “As the story’s been retold to me, I was just excited that there was company in the house in the middle of the night,” adding, “But it was highly traumatic for them.”

The attack ended a respected pharmacist’s life in Nigeria and forced a restart in Florida. When the family reached Orlando in 1985, only three other Indian families lived there, driving souvenirs to theme parks and stocking gift shop shelves.

Shan, Shyam’s father, was the last-born among nine siblings and grew up in a hut in the prison compound in far southern India where his father worked. His older siblings pooled their pay to put him through pharmacy school, where he slept under an older brother’s kitchen table.

After graduation, his sister-in-law found a help-wanted notice for a pharmacist job in Lagos, wrote a resume for him, and mailed it in. At 24, in 1975, he moved to Nigeria to help build what was described as the first drug factory in Africa. His employer, Vitabiotics, gave him a small house across from the plant, and he rose quickly.

In 1980, he returned to India to marry Girija, Shyam’s mother, who had grown up in Bombay and never been outside India. Back in Lagos, she started an open kitchen and cooked Indian breakfasts and lunches for factory workers and neighbors. Vitabiotics had asked Shan to keep the plant’s money in a safe at home, and the man who held back the others during the break-in, and who likely knew about the cash, had eaten there regularly.

Shan had learned to live with that kind of danger. He carried a spare wallet to hand over when he was held up. Shyam said his father had understood how things worked there, but added, “At some point, the bankruptcy of a corrupt system just overwhelms you.”

After the attack, the family left their belongings and Shan’s job behind and returned to India. Then a childhood friend who had moved to Los Angeles and sold trinkets to theme parks said he needed someone he could trust near the new parks in Orlando.

Shan and Girija took jobs carrying souvenirs and inexpensive costume jewelry to SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, Wet n Wild, and other parks, where they stacked the shelves in the gift shops. They dressed Shyam in misprinted souvenir shirts from that work. In the afternoons, Girija took him along while she restocked, and he wandered the parks.

On some Saturdays, the twin sonic booms from the returning Space Shuttle woke them, and they drove to the Kennedy Space Center. After the park work ended, Shan joined another company that was quickly sold, and he lost his job without any ownership stake.

He then opened a dry cleaner and later a discount store, and both went bankrupt. Shyam remembered coming home one night to find a man waiting outside to hand his father court papers.

Shan started counting pills on night shifts as a pharmacy technician. Girija bagged groceries at a supermarket while she trained to become a nurse. Shyam was often the last child picked up at school.

Shyam said his family’s passage was not the Hollywood tale of a poor immigrant arriving with nothing and striking it rich. In his words, “It was more like, poor immigrant comes here and gets kicked in the teeth over and over again. And yet we made it.”

Shan repeated one line to his son, as Shyam recalled it: “But for the grace of this country, we’d be dead in a ditch in Lagos.”