The suspect in his roommate’s murder has been identified as a student at Purdue University.
Varun Manish Chheda, 20, was discovered dead inside their McCutcheon Hall dorm room just after midnight on Wednesday. Gji Min Sha, 22, is now being charged with preliminary murder.
Residents of the hall said that a “scream or other loud sounds” woke them up in the middle of the night.
Lesley Wiete, chief of the Purdue University Police Department, said that she thought the murder was “senseless and unprovoked.”
Sha was recognized as a junior studying cybersecurity who came to the university as a South Korean overseas student.
Chheda has not yet had an autopsy, and according to Wiete, authorities have not determined the exact cause of death or if a weapon was used.
Capt. Song Kang anticipates that Sha will be booked into Tippecanoe County Jail later on Wednesday. Sha has not yet been taken there.
Tim Doty, Purdue’s director of media and public relations, told the Indianapolis Star that Sha called campus police at 12:44 a.m.
Minutes after police arrived at the first-floor house, Sha, also known as “Jimmy,” was brought into arrest. Once Sha was captured, Wiete said there was no longer a danger to the school.
Chheda was 10 days away from turning 21 when he graduated from the exclusive Park Tudor School in Indianapolis.
Varun Chheda, a member of the Park Tudor class of 2020, passed away tragically, as stated in a statement by Dennis Bisgaard, interim head of Park Tudor School. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family at this trying time.
Chheda was a 2020 National Merit Scholarship Program semifinalist, according to a Facebook post. Wiete said that he was a senior data science student at Purdue.
Police said that further inhabitants of McCutcheon Hall’s first floor had been moved elsewhere.
The latest murder on the campus of the university occurred in January 2014, when Cody Cousins, a teaching assistant in computer engineering, was found guilty of killing electrical engineering student Andrew Boldt.
Boldt was shot and stabbed by cousins, who were then 24 years old, when they entered the school’s Electrical Engineering Building brandishing a pistol and a knife. Cousins admitted to police that he was not involved in the crime. Our thoughts are with the victim, his family, friends, and anybody else he may have impacted throughout his life, Wiete added.
“This is really regrettable and tragic for us right now, and I can’t even begin to understand what his family is going through,” the speaker said.
Student safety is a top priority for school officials, according to an email delivered to students by university president Mitchell Daniels.
He stated, “Our hearts and sympathies go out to all of those touched by this horrible occurrence. This is as sad an event as we can fathom occurring on our campus.”