Searches by the CMS collaboration for the WR at √s = 8 have seen a 2.8σ excess in the electron channel for an invariant final statemass (meejj) in the range 1.8–2.4 TeV. It has been shown in the literature that this excess is compatible with models where gR ≈ 0.6gL. We analyse the CMS result in the light of SO(10) GUTs and show that the result can be accommodated by SO(10) models with TeV range SU(2)R breaking and D-parity breaking above 1012 GeV. In our analysis we respect the extended survival hypothesis and also shed some light on the Higgs content of such SO(10) models. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016.