Aishwarya Thatikonda had a birthday coming up. In less than two weeks she would turn 27, and she wanted to hit the mall to shop for the occasion with a friend.
But first, she called her boss, Srinivas Chaluvadi. His flight in from Pittsburgh would land that afternoon, and they were supposed to meet at a construction site. She wanted to pick him up at the airport. She insisted.
Thatikonda never made it to the terminal. She was killed in the mass shooting at Allen Premium Outlets that left eight dead and seven wounded.
Her friend, Sreyas Dadi, 26, was shot three times. He is recovering from surgery, according to his uncle, Kamal Nandikonda.
In the days since her death, Thatikonda’s large wooden desk in her Frisco office transformed from a home base for managing construction projects to a makeshift memorial, covered in bouquets of red roses and orchids. Celebrations of a recently-completed project were canceled.
“Destiny had different plans,” Chaluvadi said.
Thatikonda was just beginning her career at Perfect General Contractors LLC in Frisco. Thatikonda and Chaluvadi worked together for more than two years out of the unassuming red brick building on Punjab Way, trading jokes and forming a bond.
“She’s staying away from her parents, 11,000 miles away, so she found a fatherly figure in me and I found a daughter-like personality in her,” Chaluvadi said.
The Chaluvadi family planned to host Thatikonda at their home for her birthday May 18. The dinner would be simple, just some rice and curries, but that didn’t make it any less special, Chaluvadi said.
“Nothing fancy about it,” he said. “But the memory is fancy. The occasion is fancy.”
Thatikonda wanted to buy a house, get married and raise a family. She found a spiritual home at the Karya Siddhi Hanuman Temple in Frisco.
“She had dreams,” Naveena Pitta, Thatikonda’s best friend since seventh grade, said. “She was always there for me and we wanted to grow old together.”
Thatikonda had come to the United States to study construction management at Eastern Michigan University and graduated in 2020.
She had spent all her life in her family home in Hyderabad, but when she told her father she wanted to study civil engineering, an uncommon career path to study abroad for, she didn’t take no for an answer.
“I want to expose myself to the world,” she told him.
Her older brother called a friend from the neighborhood, Raj Kumar Dhubba, a software engineer in Farmington, Michigan.
“Please go, brother, and make her feel comfortable,” he told Dhubba.
Thatikonda called Dhubba anna, or brother, in Telugu.
“I was like a moral support,” he said.
During her time at Eastern Michigan University, Thatikonda would spend days in Farmington with Dhubba eating vegetarian biryani, mirchi bajji and pani puri — foods that reminded her of home. She dragged him all around the state, from a concert by famous Telugu singer Mano to the Tulip Festival in Holland, Michigan.
She wanted to see everything, capture everything. Dubba watched her and Pitta take 50 photos of red and yellow tulips.
The Tulip Festival was Pitta’s first trip since moving to the United States. Now, Holland, Michigan, will always remind her of her late best friend and the time they spent trying on wooden clogs. The two were inseparable no matter the distance. Pitta, 26, said she learned her confidence because of Thatikonda’s outspoken personality pushing Pitta out of her comfort zone.
“I didn’t ever think something would happen to her,” Pitta said. “She would always be there for me. Losing that person is just so, I don’t know, so difficult.”
Flying Thatikonda home
Ashok Kolla received the first call around 10 p.m. Saturday. A cousin of his friend had been shot at the Allen outlets and was being treated at a local hospital.
Calls like these are common for Kolla. As treasurer of the Telugu Association of North America, he often serves as the connection between families in India and the large Telugu community in North Texas. He files paperwork and organizes flights back to India for people who die in the U.S.
Sometime between 2 and 3 a.m. Sunday, Kolla said, he received another message. Aishwarya Thatikonda, a 26-year-old project engineer, was nowhere to be found, and no one could reach her. Kolla didn’t know Thatikonda or her family, but the message kickstarted a 58-hour search to find and send her body home.
Kolla and other volunteers started calling local hospitals. They went to the police station. They scoured the outlet mall.
With no luck and no other leads, Kolla turned to the last place the search team wanted to look: The Collin County Medical Examiner’s office.
The medical examiner’s office staff asked for details: Did Thatikonda have any scars? What was she wearing? Did she have on any jewelry?
She had a mole on her face, Kolla said, and she was wearing purple Under Armor sneakers.
By 5:45 they knew. They called her parents in India.
Now, they turned their efforts to getting her home.
Two teams went to work to expedite a process that usually takes days. Kolla organized the paperwork to get Thatikonda on a flight the next day. Rahma Funeral Home in northern Dallas embalmed Thatikonda’s body and organized a visitation.
From 9 to 11:30 p.m. Monday, more than 100 people said goodbye as she lay in a wood casket in a green shirt.
The Consulate General of India in Houston, opened its doors at 11 p.m. for the volunteers. They sent copies of the flight paperwork to India before driving back to Dallas in the middle of the night.
The funeral director had never worked so fast. The volunteers got home right before sunrise. But shortly after noon on Tuesday, 43 hours after her death was confirmed, Thatikonda’s body was on a flight home.
