MAGS
During a vacation to San Francisco with his family, Erik Lehnsherr's wife Magda and his youngest daughter Lorna are killed during the first Kaiju attack on K-DAY, August 11, 2013. A noted scholar, Erik turns his grief towards something productive- finding a way to stop these monsters. He has a pivotal role in developing the Jaegers for the Pan Pacific Defense Corps, while his close friend Charles Xavier develops the system known as Cerebro that allows pilots to interact with and control the Jaeger mecha with their minds.
In 2015 the first Jaeger is launched and together Erik and Charles (due to necessity at the time rather than desire) become the first pilots. Three years later during a skirmish to protect Taiwan, Erik loses control and chases the rabbit, allowing the Kaiju to defeat them in battle (while rendering Charles paralyzed), and kill hundreds of thousands of people.
He has not taken it well at all that his children are pilots and he doesn't even speak to his daughter and has a tenuous relationship with his son. Erik has remained with the PPDC at the Los Angeles Shatterdome, but he has become increasingly bitter about humanity's prospects as more powerful Kaiju come through the breach with more frequency. Where he once saw the world's hope for the future in the Jaegers, he now only sees an exercise in futility.