Last Friday, Sheela got the news that she had been waiting for. Kamlesh Agrawal, the suspect in her sister Deepa's murder, had been arrested in a suburban hotel in Mumbai, India.
"She was my better half, she was my big sister, she was perfect. I wanted to be her." At times Sheela Agarwal, Trinity '00, still can't believe that the sister she is describing, Deepa, is gone.
Like many sisters, Sheela and Deepa shared a tight bond. Growing up in Orlando, Fla., they shared a room and never went a day without speaking, even after both went to college.
But last July, their 20-year bond ended. Deepa, a student at the University of Central Florida, was living in Orlando. Sheela was in New York on an internship, but the two remained connected by phone every day. Even so, Sheela says, "When I hadn't heard from her for a couple of days, I didn't think anything of it."
As the days passed, and her parents, who had since moved back to India, became concerned, she filed a missing persons report. A police officer was dispatched to Deepa's apartment, searched it, but found nothing.
More days passed. Finally, Sheela persuaded the Orlando police to search the apartment again. In her bedroom, police found blood splattered on the floor; in a closet, they found Deepa's body.
In New York, Sheela received a call from her high school guidance counselor who had heard news reports of a body being found and who knew that Deepa was missing. Later that evening, Sheela received a call from Orlando police. "I still didn't believe it," she says. "They couldn't recognize the body at all because of what he had done," she says. 'He,' as far as Sheela understands it, was Kamlesh Agrawal, a 21-year old fellow UCF student and Deepa's third cousin.
Two weeks after the murder, Orlando officials charged Kamlesh with the crime. "People had seen him leaving the apartment, they had heard screaming, his fingerprints were everywhere," Sheela says. Sgt. Ron Corlew, one of the Orlando Police Department's investigators for the case, could not be reached for comment following several phone calls.
Sheela says Kamlesh had sold his car and some of Deepa's possessions and had flown to his home country of India long before Deepa's body was discovered.
Back in Orlando, Sheela and a few friends went back to the apartment to move the rest of Deepa's possessions. Until then, Sheela says she had rationalized her sister's death into a denial of it. She told herself that she was simply helping her sister move out of an apartment when she came across something that was undeniable-Deepa's blood-stained bed. Sheela's voice breaks as she tries to describe what happened afterwards. "I left after that, I couldn't...."
When she returned to New York, Sheela followed developments in the case and prepared to return to Duke for her senior year, a year she would have to tackle without her sister. "The police in Orlando seemed to be doing very little," she said. "I'm not saying it's because she's an Indian American but in my eyes if she was a white American there's no way that the American public would let this lie."
With the case at a dead end, Sheela's father began working for justice from India. "We all knew him and we knew his family and of course we confronted them in India and they said 'We haven't heard from him,'" Sheela says.
Sheela's parents themselves are fugitives from U.S. law. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, they were indicted on tax fraud charges last spring.
Although a formal extradition treaty had been signed between India and the United States in 1997, Sheela says Indian officials refused to try to find or arrest Kamlesh, and U.S. officials were doing little to pressure them. Under the two-step U.S. extradition process, officials would formally request a provisional arrest from a foreign government and then the suspect would be extradited.
Sheela contends that Orlando police took about five months to fax the request for Kamlesh's arrest to India, and that by then his family had bribed enough public officials to ensure his safety.
As the case dragged on and seemed no nearer to a conclusion, Sheela got involved. She set up a web site for her sister (www.duke.edu/~sa9) that details the case and asks everyone to write to his or her congressperson. She contacted Indian-American groups on campus as well as major newspapers around the country, trying to champion her cause.
On July 11, she coordinated several events in Washington, including a vigil in front of the White House attended by Rep. Dan Miller of Florida as well as representatives from the offices of Congressmen Bill McCollum of Florida and David Price, who represents a portion of the Triangle area in North Carolina.
The day after the vigil, Sheela and her brother Deepak had a meeting with the deputy Indian ambassador; Price sent a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright expressing his interest in the case; Miller met with Attorney General Janet Reno to discuss the issue.
"The injustice that Sheela and the Agarwal family face is all too common in this country," Miller said in a press release. In November, Miller introduced the International Extradition Enforcement Act, which would require the State Department to submit an annual report to Congress on extradition cases that are pending. The president would then be required to submit a list of nations that are "uncooperative" in extradition efforts. These nations would be ineligible to receive economic development or security assistance from the United States.
A few days after the vigil Sheela received the phone call she had been waiting for. "My parents called me and then I spoke to the State Attorney's office in Florida saying that they had been informed of the arrest."
At that point she broke down. "I cried quite a bit, I cried all day. It makes it real, I can't hide behind this campaigning anymore." Sheela says she never expected progress so quickly; the unanticipated victory brought back all the memories of her sister's death. "At this point I'm still numb," she says. "I can't believe it. I was not prepared for this, and I'm still not prepared for it."
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.