One of Kavipriya Muthuramalingam’s favorite memories of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, the Garmin engineer killed in a Kansas shooting this week, is of him cooking biryani, a South Asian dish.
Srinu, as Muthuramalingam calls him, was a recent master’s degree graduate in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and so was she. Both found work after school at the aviation and defense company Rockwell Collins. The two of them, along with some other recent grads, formed a small community and one day Srinu offered to cook for Muthuramalingam and another friend, Kanu Salaria.
“We got so excited and worked up,” Muthuramalingam says. The two were looking forward to the spicy, meat-filled dish — only to learn Srinu was a vegetarian, and the “traditional” dinner was a plate of vegetables and rice. “It’s good guys, just try it,” she remembers him saying. They teased him for years. “He won my heart that day,” Salaria says.
Kuchibhotla was murdered this week in a high-profile incident that may lead to federal hate crime charges. The Garmin engineer was shot at an Olathe, Kansas, bar, allegedly by 51-year-old Adam Purinton, who was arrested hours after the incident.