Student's murder in US casts gloom in AP

Four days have passed to the brutal murder of T Sowmya Reddy in the US but her family here is yet to get any proper information about the incident and any assurance when the body will be sent back to India.

Hemalatha, the widowed mother of Sowmya Reddy, who is shocked and stunned since the tragic news reached her, has appealed to the state government to intervene and ensure that the body of the 22-year-old student of Southern Illinois University is sent back to Hyderabad soon.

Sowmya, who originally hails from Kadam mandal of Adilabad district, was doing her MS (Electronics) at the Edwards Ville campus. According to the sketchy reports reaching home, she was found murdered in her car at a distance from the campus. She was last seen in the company of an Afro-American student. Investigations into the case has now been taken over the Federal Bureau of Investigation, reports from the US said.

Ever since the news Sowmya's death reached home, the family living in Padmarao Nagar colony of Secunderabad is under utter shock and disbelief. "I can't believe that my daughter is not alive. She had spoken to me only a day before the incident," Hemalatha said.

Sowmya Reddy comes from the family of brilliant scholars. While her elder sister Sahaja is dong post graduation from Governance State University, Chicago, her brother Rajesh Reddy is a student of IIT Chennai.

The family members said that Sowmya was a brilliant student all through her educational career and was a topper in school and college. She went to the US in July 2007.

The family has shifted to Hyderabad from Adilabad in 1996 after Sowmya's father, a government employee died. Hemalatha is also a government employee and she brought up the children hard way.  

In her last call home, Sowmya had told the family that she will be visiting them during the next holidays in March. But now the family is waiting for the body.

Sowmya is the fourth student from Andhra Pradesh to fall prey to the violent crimes in the United States during last seven months. Two PhD students Chandrasekhara Reddy and Kiran Kumar Allam were killed in Louisiana University in December last year while Dr A Srinivas was found dead in Pennsylvania University in March this year. The US police arrested group of black youth, with past criminal records in connection with the murder of the two PhD students in their hostel room.