Kanagala Seshadri Rao was 24 and a graduate student in the Boston University Graduate School of Management when he was found fatally shot on Allston Street in Boston in the early morning of April 19, 2012. Police discovered him at about 2:30 a.m.; he had sustained gunshot wounds to the head and leg and was pronounced dead at the scene near the Commonwealth Avenue campus.

Friends and professors remembered Rao, known as Sesh, as kind-hearted, intelligent and ambitious — a student who loved coding and computer games and who had recently secured a professor as a reference for a summer internship application. Two weeks before the shooting he and a female classmate were mugged in Ringer Park; during that robbery others took money and a laptop and Rao was assaulted after refusing to surrender his belongings. It is not known whether the mugging and the later killing were connected.

The Boston Police Department and Boston University Police Department opened a joint investigation and increased patrols in the Allston area. No arrests or publicly identified suspects had been announced in the months after the killing, and the motive remained unclear. If anyone knew Sesh, saw him in Allston that night, or has information about the earlier Ringer Park robbery, please come forward.