Shalini Thakur told a Sacramento court her stalker would kill somebody. California gave her a form. The man who executed her outside a Howe Avenue Panera had been caught at the Arizona border in 2023 and released.

By Dean Maddox, Public Safety & Crime Reporter

Tuesday afternoon, about 3 o’clock, Shalini Thakur got dropped off at her car outside the Panera Bread on Howe Avenue. A 22-year-old man named Rohit Rohit was already sitting in the lot waiting for her.

She tried to run. He chased her through the parking lot in front of witnesses, pulled a gun, and shot her several times. After she went down, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office says he walked up and shot her in the head.

Ten minutes later he was dead in his own car on eastbound Highway 50 near Watt Avenue. Deputies boxed him in. He put one in himself before they could pull him out. Traffic sat there for hours. That is the part people saw from the overpass.

The part they did not see started a year earlier.

Thakur, 38, knew Rohit from DoorDash pickups at her workplace. Sheriff’s homicide detectives say the friendship curdled into a fixation. In January she found an Apple AirTag hidden under the hood of her car. He let the air out of a tire and followed her to work so he could offer to help. He got a copy of her apartment key and walked in while she was asleep, then claimed he was only worried because she had not answered. He parked outside her house for hours. He left groceries on the porch after a judge had already told him to stay away. In the court papers she filed in May, she wrote that he had threatened to shoot himself or anyone she met.

“This behavior continues to worsen over time,” she told the court.

She first reported him in March. Detectives stayed in contact. They told her to get a restraining order. She did, in May. A process server put the papers in his hand on May 19. On July 29 she called deputies again. He had dumped random grocery-store items at her front door. That is a violation. It is also a piece of paper. Paper does not stop a man standing in a parking lot with a gun.

Her mother, Sudesh Kumari, spoke with her daughter at 1:58 p.m. Tuesday, less than an hour before the shooting. Thakur said she would call back in fifteen minutes. The call never came. Kumari kept texting. Please call me. I am worried about you. No answer. No answer. She later told local television that police did not protect her daughter. She is a widow. Shalini was her only child.

Lt. Amar Gandhi, speaking for the sheriff, put it in language a beat cop would use. “He, obviously, developed a real fixation on her. At one point, I think he told her, ‘I want to marry you.’ We were at that point of obsession.”

Obsession is not a legal status. Illegal presence is.

On Friday the Department of Homeland Security said what the local briefings had left out. Rohit Rohit is an Indian national. He crossed the southern border into Arizona in August 2023. Border Patrol arrested him. The Biden administration released him into the country. Federal court records showed a case still pending, no hearing on the calendar, no appeal filed. DHS never heard from him again until a woman was dead on Howe Avenue.

“This illegal alien from India harassed, stalked, and then killed a 38-year-old woman in California, and then took his own life when police caught up to him,” a DHS spokesperson said. “Sanctuary politicians must put an end to reckless policies that play Russian roulette with American lives. Our thoughts and prayers are with the victim and her family.”

The department also said the killing would have been avoided if he had been sent home in 2023 instead of turned loose. That is a political sentence. It is also a timeline. Catch. Release. AirTag. Restraining order. Execution in a shopping-center lot.

California’s 2017 sanctuary statute, Senate Bill 54, is the wall between that timeline and a phone call to ICE. The law keeps most local agencies from using their people or their jails to help federal immigration officers pick someone up, unless the person already has a serious or violent felony on the sheet. Stalking a woman, planting a tracker on her car, and walking into her apartment while she sleeps does not automatically punch that ticket. By the time Rohit had a murder on him, he had already shot himself on Highway 50.

Local deputies are not villains in this. They took her reports. They pushed the restraining order. After the shooting, witnesses gave them a vehicle description and the Flock camera network put the car on Highway 50 within minutes. That is police work. What they are not allowed to do, under the rules Sacramento wrote, is treat an illegal border crosser who is terrorizing a woman as an immigration problem instead of a civil-harassment file.

A restraining order is a form. It tells a judge what already happened and asks the state to pretend the next chapter will be different. Sometimes it works. A lot of men back off when a deputy shows up with paper. This one did not. He had already told her how the story ended.

The Bee and the television stations will spend the next week on gun-violence restraining orders and whether California needs a better piece of paper. Fine. Argue the gun. Argue the service of process. Argue whether deputies should have parked a car on her block. Those are real questions. They are not the first question.

The first question is why a man Border Patrol already had in hand in Arizona was living in Sacramento long enough to learn her route to work.

Newsom will point to prison-to-ICE transfers. He always does. Those are people leaving state lockup after a felony, not a 22-year-old with a pending immigration case and a growing file of harassment reports. Federal officials have said for years that California turns down thousands of detainers at the county level. This year’s budget still parks money with lawyers whose job is to fight removals. That is a choice. Own it. Do not call it compassion while a mother in this city is packing to go back to India without her daughter.

Shalini Thakur did what the system told her to do. She reported him. She filed the paperwork. She kept the deputies in the loop. She called her mother an hour before she died. The state handed her a restraining order and a speech about safety planning. The man who killed her should have been on a plane in 2023.

Paper in her hand. Body in the parking lot. That is not a tragedy that fell out of the sky. That is a policy with a street address.