Now, it’s global news that Aishwarya Thatikonda was one of the Telugu who was shot and died during the Texas mass shooting. But the incident was unlike any that Texas Indians had faced, and it was not easy to identify Aishwarya as her face was not recognizable due to the bullets that went into her.
Back home, several thousand miles away, her family was worried about her and were constantly calling Ashok Kolla of TANA, the Telugu organization that looks into several matters pertaining to Telugu people in the US. Ashok Kolla had been to crashes and shootouts but never a mass killing. He is part of the team who are trained by TANA to handle such situations.
Ashok immediately rushed to the scene when he was informed that two of the dead were part of his community. While one was in the hospital, the other was not found. They searched through all hospitals and finally went to the Collin County medical examiner’s office.
It was here that Ashok had the big task of identifying Aishwarya. After a lot of back-and-forth calls, Ashok could tell the examiners there that she had one earring, one little scar on her eye. Finally, the examiner’s matched her fingerprints and gave the sad news that it was indeed Aishwarya.
But the story does not end there. Now, there will be a lot of paperwork cancellation of Aishwarya’s passport, after which her body will be flown one final time to her family for the funeral.
Incidentally, Allen was a small town north of Dallas with a 20,000 population. Now, it has 220,000 people, most of whom are South Asians who live in the Dallas-Fort Worth region.
