At 1:58 pm on September 8, Shalini Thakur told her mother she'd call back in fifteen minutes.
She didn't.
An hour later she was dead in a parking lot on Howe Avenue, shot by a man she'd spent almost a year trying to get away from
Rohit Rohit was already there when she showed up.
That's the account from the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office anyway. Thakur, 38, had just been dropped off near her car at the Arden-Arcade shopping center that Tuesday afternoon. Rohit, 22, walked over and confronted her. She ran. He caught up and started shooting.
Someone nearby saw enough of his car to describe it to deputies. From there it moved fast. Sacramento's FLOCK camera network picked him up on eastbound Highway 50 near Watt Avenue, and officers had him boxed in within minutes. Not that it mattered by then. When they got to the vehicle after a standoff that shut the freeway down for hours, Rohit was already dead. Self-inflicted, the sheriff's office said.
He drove for DoorDash. Made regular runs to an IHOP where Thakur worked. That's how they knew each other in the first place, which is almost the worst part of this whole thing.
Go back through the court paperwork and you can watch it build.
Thakur wrote in her restraining order request that it started around September 2025 and just kept getting worse. By January she'd found an Apple AirTag stuck under the hood of her car. Around then, deputies say, Rohit let the air out of one of her tires and then showed up like it was a coincidence, offering to help.
Then it escalated for real. He got hold of a copy of her apartment key somehow, nobody's figured out how, and let himself in while she was sleeping. He pushed her to marry him. Tried to control who she hung out with. In her own filing she wrote that he'd threatened to shoot himself, or her, if she said no again. She was 38, he was 22, and by some accounts that gap was part of why she wasn't interested.
She first told authorities about all this in March. Didn't want to press charges yet, didn't want a restraining order. Deputies kept checking in on her anyway, worried about where this was headed. In May they finally talked her into filing. Rohit got served on May 19. The order was supposed to run through 2027.
On July 29, Thakur called it in again: Rohit had left groceries at her door. Violation, plain and simple.
Sergeant Amar Gandhi told reporters afterward that deputies went looking for him twice following that report. Came up empty both times.
Local station KCRA later dug into it and found something harder to sit with: deputies actually had probable cause to arrest him weeks before the shooting happened. They just never caught up to him in time.
By Friday this had turned into something bigger than one case.
Homeland Security confirmed Rohit crossed into the US illegally through Arizona back in 2023. Border Patrol picked him up at the time, according to DHS, then released him while his immigration case worked through the system under the Biden administration. Court records checked afterward showed his hearings hadn't even been scheduled yet.
A DHS spokesperson didn't hold back, saying the killing never had to happen and that it wouldn't have if Rohit hadn't been let into the country in the first place. The statement leaned hard on "sanctuary politicians," calling on them to drop what it called reckless policy.
Governor Newsom's office wasn't having it. Spokesperson Diana Crofts-Pelayo said pinning this on California's sanctuary law doesn't hold up, and that it pulls attention away from the actual problem: stalking cases that don't get handled right, and restraining orders nobody enforces. For what it's worth, investigators say Rohit had no criminal record here before any of this.
None of that changes anything for Sudesh Kumari.
She flew in from India to spend a long stretch with her only child. Her husband died two years back. Instead of a visit, she's now arranging a funeral.
She told a local news crew that her daughter called the police "so many times" and nothing happened. Standing by the candles and flowers piling up outside that Panera Bread, she just said the system failed her.
A GoFundMe for funeral costs calls Thakur caring, hardworking, selfless. The family's holding a memorial for her on Monday, September 14.
Shalini Thakur, 38, was shot dead on September 8 outside a Sacramento Panera Bread by Rohit Rohit, a 22-year-old DoorDash driver who'd been stalking her since around September 2025.
There was an AirTag under her car, a break-in while she slept, a restraining order she got in May that he broke by July, and two failed attempts by deputies to find him afterward. He shot her multiple times, ran, then killed himself once police cornered him on Highway 50.
DHS says he'd entered the country illegally in 2023 and was released under the Biden administration, which has now turned into a fight with Governor Newsom's office over California's sanctuary policies. Her mother says the system failed her daughter. The family holds a memorial service on September 14.
