A 14-year-old boy was charged in the January fatal shooting of a graduate student from India outside a Walmart in the West Chatham neighborhood, Chicago police announced Tuesday.
The juvenile was charged with first-degree murder and robbery with a firearm in the death of Devasish Nandepu, 23.
Nandepu was shot in the back during a robbery Jan. 22 outside Walmart in the 8300 block of South Holland Road, where another graduate student was shot in the chest. Nandepu was pronounced dead the next morning, according to the Cook County medical examiner’s office.
The juvenile was arrested Monday on the Far South Side by the Great Lakes Regional Fugitive Task Force and Chicago police. The boy was identified as one of the people involved in the armed robbery of three graduate students in the Walmart parking lot.
One of the students had just enrolled at Illinois Institute of Technology, while Nandepu and another came from India to start the spring semester at Governors State University.
According to a police report, the three students were on their way to the Walmart when a Kia pulled up and two gunmen wearing face masks jumped out. One was carrying a “long gun,” possibly a rifle, and the other a handgun, as they “began to demand the victims’ belongings,” the police report said.
“Get on the ground,” they yelled, saying they wanted their cellphones and pass codes but after snatching a $5 bill and a $1 bill, without the phones, the attacker with the rifle began to shoot — hitting Koppala and Nandepu, according to the police report.
The shooter got back in the Kia and fled.
“I was saved by God’s grace, but they both were hit by bullets,” Lakshman Gogada, one of the students, told the Tribune in February.
