Ashok Kolla spent hours over the weekend working to locate and identify the body of a young woman from India whose whereabouts were unknown after Saturday’s mass shooting at the Allen Premium Outlets mall.
Kolla ventured out to the mall Sunday morning in hopes of finding Aishwarya Thatikonda, who came to the U.S. five years ago to study and pursue her dreams as an engineer.
“We went to the medical examiner’s office at 10:30 in the morning,” Kolla said. “We had the luck of meeting one of the officers. He started exchanging identification marks. … It took awhile to figure it out.”
Early Sunday evening, the Collin County medical examiner’s office confirmed Thatikonda’s identity using fingerprints. Some of her cousins also helped identify the 26-year-old, whose birthday would have been May 18.
Kolla, 36, is a volunteer with the Telugu Association of North America, a nonprofit organization formed in 1977 that takes action when someone in the Indian community is hurt or killed in the United States or Canada.
In addition to promoting cultural heritage and engaging in charity, TANA also seeks to reunite or connect victims in North America with their families, who are often based somewhere in India.
“I think probably TANA is the only organization that can expedite this whole process,” Kolla said.
However, the process of recovering a body and learning more information about someone whose family is thousands of miles away is often complicated. Without an organization like TANA, it could take up to a week before the family knows what happened to their loved one, Kolla said.
“We streamlined the process from six or seven days to 36 to 48 hours,” said Kolla, who lives in Frisco. While Kolla has helped families deal with tragic incidents before, this was his first time handling a mass shooting event so close to home.
Thatikonda’s family is based in Hyderabad, a city in the Indian state of Telangana that she last visited in December for her brother’s wedding, The Indian Express reported. It was early Monday in their time zone when they learned of her death.
Thatikonda’s brother, Srikanth Reddy Thatikonda, spoke on the phone with Kolla, communicating on behalf of his family and providing information about his sister. Thatikonda’s mother had not yet been made aware of her daughter’s death the last time Kolla called, he said.
After getting a death certificate and making several calls to the Indian consulate in Houston, Kolla coordinated with an airline to return Thatikonda’s body to Hyderabad.
“I pray to God to give [her family] enough strength to handle the situation,” Kolla said, adding that “she came to the U.S. with such a bright future.”
For Kolla, a software engineer who emigrated from India in 2007, Thatikonda’s life represented the hopes of many Indians. After graduating from Eastern Michigan University, she moved to Texas to work at Frisco-based Perfect General Contractors.
“Coming to the U.S. is a dream come true for many Indians,” Kolla said. “When we come, we don’t have immediate family members, or anyone. We are leaving our family miles and miles away from home.”
Nearly 220,000 Indian Americans live in North Texas, and TANA aims to serve this population — particularly those who have moved to the U.S. without close family.
“We don’t have anyone to help us when an unfortunate incident happens, and we feel that it’s our responsibility as an organization to help all of our community members,” Kolla said.
