A 21-year-old Houston college student has been found shot to death in her apartment after an armed robbery — and authorities have arrested a man in connection to the slaying, police said.
Muna Pandey, a community college student from Nepal, was found with multiple gunshot wounds inside her southwest Houston apartment around 5:30 p.m. Monday, Houston police said.
Staff at Pandey’s apartment complex told authorities that before calling 911, they received an anonymous call about a body inside the apartment, police said. Paramedics pronounced Pandey dead at the scene.
Police on Wednesday released a surveillance photo of a man seen leaving Pandey’s apartment on Saturday following what KHOU reported was an armed robbery.
Further investigation led authorities to identify the man as Bobby Sinh Shah, 52, police said in a press release.
Shah was arrested Wednesday evening during a traffic stop in northwest Houston and booked into the Harris County Jail on a charge of capital murder, police said.
Pandey, a student at Houston Community College, moved to Houston from Nepal in 2021, according to a GoFundMe fundraiser.
Drona Gautam of the Nepalese Association of Houston told the outlet Pandey’s mother had been trying to reach her for days before her body was discovered.
“What Mom said is her phone was always online. After Saturday night, phone was offline,” Gautam said.
“She had like three gunshots and she was laying down on the bed, with head down,” Gautam said. “Hopefully, the investigation will come up with some idea of how this happened.”
Gautam said he is working with the Nepal Consulate to help create travel arrangements for Pandey’s mother.
“This is very unfortunate to her because she’s the only child. She’s the only one child of the mother — so she’s very devastated,” Gautam told the outlet.
The fundraiser to help cover Pandey’s funeral and bring her mother to Houston had raised over $14,000 as of Thursday.
On Monday, Rice University student Andrea Rodriguez Avila was found shot to death in her dorm room in an apparent murder-suicide.
Avila and a man, who was not a student, were found dead in her dorm room at Jones College along with a note believed to be written by the shooter that indicated the two had been in a romantic relationship.
The suspected shooter has not been named.
