The Boston University graduate student shot to death three months ago in Allston had been mugged in a nearby park two weeks earlier, according to a police report and e-mails between the slain man’s father and another student also mugged that night.
Kanagala Seshadri Rao, 24, and his classmate told police that they were set upon by several men in Ringer Park, near Rao’s apartment, on April 5. The robbers took money and a laptop computer, they said.
Two weeks later, Rao was found shot to death steps from the same park and about 500 feet from his residence. Authorities have made no arrests or disclosed a possible motive in the slaying, which stirred fear in the neighborhood popular with college students.
Rao was found along the 100 block of Allston St. with multiple gunshot wounds to the head and leg, about 2:40 a.m. April 19.
Minutes before the shooting, at about 2:17 a.m., Rao had texted the classmate who had been with him during the earlier robbery, saying he was about to visit her and help fix a mistake he saw in her school assignment, according to the e-mails between Rao’s father, Kanagala Sudhakar Rao, and the classmate. The e-mails were provided to the Globe by the father.
The walk should have taken about 10 minutes. Rao never made it.
In the April 5 robbery, Rao and the classmate were sitting near the park’s tennis court around 11 p.m. when six men between 20 and 24 years old and wearing black and gray hoodies approached and asked them for money and their cellphones, said the police report.
The classmate gave the men two $5 bills and her laptop from her backpack. Rao refused to give them anything, and the men began punching and kicking him. After realizing that police were on the way, the muggers fled toward the Jackson Mann K-8 School, the report said.
Rao, who was enrolled in a master’s program at BU’s management school, suffered bruises and minor cuts to his face and hands, but declined medical treatment.