Shalini Thakur Among Victims in Horrifying Rising Toll

At the height of the pandemic, Sacramento pizza restaurant owner Daljit Khangura found it difficult to hire employees willing to reliably turn up for work. A friend then recommended Shalini Thakur.

“She came in and managed the business as though it were her own,” Khangura, 63, told the Daily Mail. “She really took charge. Her work ethic was exceptional.”

Thakur, 38, later moved on to a management role at IHOP, though she and Khangura stayed close. He saw her as the sister he never had, while she viewed him as a brotherly presence in her life.

That bond made the phone call Khangura received last week especially devastating. An IHOP manager called him and began to cry, immediately signaling that something terrible had happened to Thakur.

His fears were confirmed. Thakur was fatally shot in broad daylight on September 8. Authorities have accused Rohit Rohit, a 22-year-old Indian national who worked as a DoorDash driver and regularly collected orders from her IHOP location, of killing her.

Khangura said he suspected Rohit even before learning his name. According to him, Rohit had allegedly stalked and harassed Thakur for nearly a year before her death.

Soon after the killing, the Department of Homeland Security said Rohit entered the United States unlawfully through Arizona in August 2023. DHS officials said Border Patrol agents arrested him before he was released by the Biden administration, though no reason for his release was given.

Thakur’s killing is devastating on its own. It has also renewed attention on other cases involving women and girls killed by people who entered the United States illegally, prompting broader questions over immigration enforcement and public safety failures.

In February 2024, Laken Riley, a 22-year-old nursing student, was attacked and murdered while jogging in Athens, Georgia. She was killed by José Antonio Ibarra, a Venezuelan man who had entered the US illegally.

A few months later, 12-year-old Jocelyn Nungaray was raped and strangled to death in Houston, Texas. Two illegal immigrants from Venezuela, Johan José Martínez-Rangel and Franklin José Peña Ramos, were both charged with capital murder and are awaiting trial.

And around the same time that Rohit crossed the southern border in 2023, Rachel Morin, a 37-year-old mother of five, was brutally raped and murdered by an illegal immigrant from El Salvador while on a hiking trail in Bel Air, Maryland.

Rachel’s brother Michael had been thinking of Thakur long before he even heard her name.

‘During the search for Rachel, I repeatedly thought about the next woman,’ Michael told the Daily Mail. ‘That hasn’t changed.’

‘The point of learning from Rachel’s case should not be winning a political argument. It should be preventing another family from joining ours.’

But if that is the lesson Michael has been asking the country to learn since August 2023, it appears class is still in session.

Khangura remembered Thakur telling him about Rohit’s apparent ‘obsession’ with her when it first began in October 2025. Initially, she dismissed him as ‘just a kid’ but soon, she realized his frequent presence was much more sinister.

And Khangura was concerned. Over the winter, he confronted Rohit at the IHOP, telling the man to leave his friend alone.

But it was to no avail.

For nearly a year, Rohit stalked, threatened and harassed Thakur, hiding an Apple AirTag under the hood of her car, slashing her tires and vowing to kill them both. At one point, he even made a copy of her apartment key and let himself into her home while she was asleep.

‘She woke up and started screaming for him to get out,’ Khangura said.

Rohit’s ‘fixation’ with Thakur was so concerning that law enforcement urged her to seek a restraining order, which she did in May. Police were instructed to arrest Rohit if he violated the order, and on July 29, Thakur filed a report to deputies, informing them Rohit had left random grocery items at her front door – a violation of the order that protected her, her home and her work.

The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office said deputies tried to contact Rohit after the restraining order violation was reported but that they were not successful.

On September 8, as Thakur was being dropped off at work, Rohit confronted her. When she tried to run away, he shot her multiple times. He then approached her where she lay grievously wounded and shot her in the head at close range. Rohit fled the scene and ultimately killed himself during a standoff with police.

‘Politicians in Sacramento have blood on their hands,’ Khangura said. ‘The police failed her. The system failed her.’

He believes Thakur’s death is a direct result of Sacramento’s status as a sanctuary city and urged elected officials to enact a law that would prevent these attacks.

Neama Rahmani, a former federal prosecutor and president of West Coast Trial Lawyers, told the Daily Mail that California not only has strong stalking laws, but ones that become even more protective when a restraining order is in place.

A restraining order would prohibit a person from owning a gun and could send someone to state prison for up to four years if they were to violate the order.

‘Unfortunately, in [Thakur’s] case, law enforcement did not or could not arrest Rohit after he violated the restraining order in late July,’ Rahmani said.

‘The stalker and her victim were not in a relationship, so it’s not a domestic violence case, but there’s an old expression that today’s domestic violence and stalking is tomorrow’s murder and unfortunately that’s exactly what happened here.’

Khangura said the only politician who has reached out to Thakur’s family in the wake of the shooting was Steve Hilton, the California Republican running for governor.

When Michael heard about Thakur’s killing, his first thoughts were of her family.

‘I know what it is like to watch somebody you love suddenly become part of a national story,’ he said.

‘I do not want to use another family’s loss to make a political point. But [the] government should learn from cases like Rachel’s. If somebody presents warning signs or authorities have already encountered them, agencies need to communicate and act effectively.’

Victor Martinez-Hernandez, the 24-year-old who killed Rachel, had previously been connected to a 2023 home invasion in Los Angeles, during which he assaulted a nine-year-old girl and her mother. He had crossed the southern border into the US after he was wanted in El Salvador for the murder of another woman.

Martinez-Hernandez was arrested and deported three times – on January 19, January 31 and February 6 – before he successfully entered the US unlawfully on February 13 near El Paso, Texas.

Michael said that learning about Martinez-Hernandez’s history was ‘incredibly difficult.’

‘My reaction was not simply political. It was, how did this happen? How did somebody repeatedly encounter the system and still end up here?’

On August 5, 2023, Rachel – a mother of five children between 8 and 18 – went for a run on the Ma & Pa Trail that her family grew up going to.

The family lived near the trailhead, and often jogged there together. Michael remembers training with Rachel, helping her work on breathing and going further distances. Shannon Morin, Michael’s wife, remembers taking her kids there with Rachel and Rachel’s kids.

‘It was just a safe place we could walk with the kids,’ Shannon, who was friends with Rachel long before she married Michael, told the Daily Mail. ‘We could decompress, hang out and talk and spend time with our babies.’

Michael and Shannon even married at Liriodendron, a historic mansion located on the Heavenly Waters Park – the park through which the Ma & Pa Trail runs.

‘After Rachel was murdered, it became very difficult for me to separate the trail from what happened to her,’ Michael said. ‘For a long time, it felt as though the worst thing that happened there had taken ownership of the entire place.’

The weekend of Rachel’s killing, Michael, Shannon and most of their family had traveled down to Kentucky to attend the funeral of their newborn niece.

In the beginning, Shannon believed that the killer must have been someone they knew, someone who would have knowledge that her family would be out of town that day. But after police released surveillance footage, Shannon was certain that whoever had raped and murdered Rachel was a stranger.

On June 14, 2024 – after a 10-month nationwide manhunt – Martinez-Hernandez was arrested in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

‘I have never wanted Rachel to become merely a symbol for one political side or another. Immigration policy matters because policies have real consequences, but Rachel was a person before she was an immigration debate.’

To Rachel’s brother, the question is not partisan. The question is whether the system has learned enough from Rachel’s death to prevent another family from having to experience the same thing.

‘Not every person who enters this country illegally is violent, and I do not think it is truthful or helpful to pretend otherwise,’ he said. ‘My concern is what happens when there are repeated encounters, warning signs or evidence that somebody may present a danger.’

Today, Michael and Shannon are focused on remembering Rachel as the bubbly, funny, strong-willed and active person she was.

‘She was really positive and optimistic. She was always working on herself, growing, learning,’ Shannon said.

In August 2025, Martinez-Hernandez was sentenced to life without parole for first-degree murder, rape and third-degree sex offence and kidnapping. He will serve the entire sentence in a Maryland prison.

‘For a long time, we needed people to pay attention to the man who killed Rachel because we needed to find him. We needed his face shown. We needed people looking for him. We needed the public’s help,’ Michael said.

‘We do not need to find him anymore. I think part of finishing that conversation is taking him out of it.’

Perhaps then some progress might come from the tragedy as it did with Riley’s death, which spurred the Laken Riley Act. It that requires the federal detention of illegal immigrants who have been arrested for burglary, theft, larceny, shoplifting, assault of a law enforcement officer or any crime that results in death or serious bodily injury to another person.

It was the first piece of legislation signed into law by President Donald Trump in his second term.

But for now, for Thakur’s family and friends, there is no avoiding the awful fact that whatever protection in law existed for Thakur, it was neither adequate nor enforced.

Khangura is still waiting to find out how Rohit was able to obtain a car and a gun, how he was able to work for DoorDash and why police did not arrest him before his actions proved fatal.

‘What’s it going to take for a politician to react?’ he asked. ‘Does it have to happen to their child? To their wife?

‘There has to be a law that will protect women.’