A preliminary autopsy revealed that Varun Manish Chheda, 20, of Indianapolis, died from “multiple sharp force traumatic injuries.” Ji Min “Jimmy” Sha, his roommate, is being held in jail.
According to the school’s police chief, a student at Purdue University was detained on a murder charge on Wednesday
and is accused of killing his roommate during the course of the night at a residence hall on the campus in West Lafayette, Indiana.
Varun Manish Chheda, a 20-year-old Indianapolis senior majoring in data science, was found dead, according to Tippecanoe County coroner’s office and Purdue University Police Chief Lesley Wiete.
According to Wiete, Ji Min “Jimmy” Sha, a junior cybersecurity major and a foreign student from Korea, called 911 at roughly 12:45 a.m. on Wednesday to inform authorities of the fatality.
The call’s specifics weren’t made public. According to the authorities, the event took place in a room on McCutcheon Hall’s ground level.
According to jail records, Sha was detained on a murder accusation on Wednesday in the Tippecanoe County Jail. Records show that no bond was set.
According to early autopsy results, Chheda died from “several sharp force traumatic injuries,” and the cause of death was a homicide.
According to the coroner’s office, toxicology results will determine the final autopsy results.
Arunabh Sinha, a friend from Chheda’s early years, told NBC News that on Tuesday night when she was gaming and chatting with others online via Discord, they abruptly heard screaming.
Sinha’s pals said they heard the attack but didn’t know what happened that night even though they weren’t playing with him. They learned of his passing on Wednesday morning.
Sha, 22, was detained minutes after the 911 call, according to Wiete, and escorted to the police station for more inquiry.
Sha is seen being led out of a patrol car by campus police in handcuffs as reporters wait for him in a video that was uploaded on Wednesday. Sha is questioned by a reporter as he is led into a structure: “Can you explain to us why you did it?”
I love my family, Sha seems to remark after a brief pause. He then says it once more.
Wiete omitted to talk about the killing’s purpose or the specifics of the weapons used. Only Chheda and Sha were in the room at the time, according to her, and the 911 call originated there.
She noted that neither roommate was asleep at the time of the incident and declared, “I believe this was unprovoked and senseless.”
School officials declared there was no threat to the neighborhood following Chheda’s passing.
mourning at school
According to authorities, Chheda’s killing marks Purdue’s first on-campus homicide in more than eight years.
According to a statement released by the university following the event, Andrew F. Boldt, 21, of West Bend, Wisconsin, was fatally shot on January 21, 2014, in the basement section of the electrical engineering building.
Mitch Daniels, the university president, described Chheda‘s passing as “as awful an occurrence as we can imagine happening on our campus” and expressed sympathy for “all of those affected by this dreadful event.”
According to the Purdue website, there are about 50,000 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled for the next fall semester.
Students are receiving support from staff members in the residence halls and clinicians with the school’s counseling and psychological services, he said in a statement on Wednesday.
Everyone was reassured by Daniels that the campus is secure. “We experience a minuscule fraction of violent and property crime that occurs elsewhere,” he added, comparing the number of people at Purdue with cities with a population of 60,000 or more.
Such figures, he continued, “are of no comfort on a day like this.” Each of us is greatly impacted by a death that occurs on our campus or among the Purdue family.
Arunabh Sinha, who attended school for 12 years with Chheda, recalled that their families were also close friends. Chheda, he claimed, was in his third year of college and was about to leave school early.
Chheda was described by him as “an extremely smart person, always at the top of his class, at the top of the chess club, and on the science bowl team.”
He was so modest about it. He was not only a talented student, but Sinha noted that he “always did things the proper way, he refused to take short routes.”
According to Sycamore School, which Chheda attended from kindergarten to eighth grade, he won first place at a state Spanish competition in 2015 and 2016 and took top honors for a presentation in the environmental chemistry division at the State Science Olympiad Competition at Indiana University in 2015.
His Sycamore team placed seventh in 2015 at the National Science Bowl Competition in Washington, DC, according to the institution, as reported by WTHR. According to Sycamore, the squad finished second the next year.