The last time Poornima Ramarao spoke to her son, a 26-year-old software engineer named Suchir Balaji, was on his birthday, Nov. 21. He was on a backpacking trip with a few friends on Catalina Island, right off the coast of Los Angeles. It was a quick call. Ramarao wanted to let him get back to celebrating with his friends. “I blessed him, but my blessing didn’t protect him,” Ramarao tells Fortune.
After Balaji returned the next day, he spoke with his parents one more time—a brief call with his father, who told Fortune his son sounded normal, despite what would soon happen. But after not hearing from Balaji for a few days, Ramarao began to worry. On Nov. 25, she went to his home by San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood and knocked on the door but didn’t get a response. She still had not heard from him the next day, and decided to go to the police department and file a missing person’s report. When the cops finally gained entrance to his apartment, they brought out Balaji’s body on a stretcher. He had died from a gunshot wound to the head.
