The Deadly Reality Of Stalking In America
By Manu Shrivastava
The killing of 38-year-old Shalini Thakur in Sacramento, California, has exposed a disturbing progression that is increasingly familiar in cases of stalking in the United States, where unwanted attention can develop into surveillance, intimidation, physical intrusion and, ultimately, lethal violence. Thakur was shot dead on September 8 at a shopping centre after a 22-year-old man identified as Rohit allegedly confronted and chased her before opening fire. Rohit subsequently died from an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound during a standoff with police on Highway 50.
The circumstances preceding the killing are particularly troubling because they indicate a pattern rather than an isolated confrontation. Thakur had allegedly discovered an Apple AirTag concealed beneath the hood of her vehicle, while other reported incidents included the deflation of her car tyres, Rohit waiting outside her home for extended periods, following her to work and repeatedly attempting to establish contact with her. The allegations suggest that the conduct had moved progressively from unwanted attention towards deliberate monitoring and control.
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| Image for representational purpose only |
The most disturbing element was the alleged acquisition of a duplicate key to Thakur's apartment. According to the Sacramento County Sheriff's Office, Rohit obtained a copy of the key and entered the apartment while Thakur was asleep. An unauthorised entry into the private residence of a person who is already experiencing unwanted surveillance represents a significant escalation because it transforms a perceived threat outside the home into an intrusion within the place where the victim should ordinarily expect the greatest degree of security.
The allegations also indicate that Rohit's fixation had become increasingly pronounced. Sheriff's Sergeant Amar Gandhi described the conduct as a "real fixation" on Thakur, while authorities said the two had known each other for a couple of years and that Rohit had previously worked as a DoorDash delivery driver. Thakur's petition for a restraining order reportedly described him parking outside her home for hours and speaking to her daily, circumstances that demonstrate how stalking can operate through repetition, persistence and the gradual erosion of ordinary personal boundaries.
Thakur reported the behaviour to authorities in March. She initially did not wish to pursue criminal charges or seek a restraining order, but deputies subsequently urged her in May to obtain protective relief. She did so, and a restraining order was issued against Rohit. The order represented the formal recognition by the legal system that the relationship had crossed the boundary between unwanted attention and conduct requiring judicial protection.
The central question raised by the subsequent killing is therefore not simply whether a legal mechanism existed. It is whether the mechanism was capable of producing sufficient deterrence when the alleged perpetrator had already demonstrated a willingness to disregard boundaries. A restraining order is a legal command, not a physical barrier. Its effectiveness depends upon the restrained individual obeying the order and upon law enforcement, prosecutors and courts being able to respond quickly when there is evidence of a violation. Where a person is sufficiently fixated to track a victim, wait outside the victim's home, enter the home without permission or repeatedly seek contact, the mere existence of an order may not necessarily alter the underlying behaviour.
That problem is not unique to Sacramento. The United States' own public-health data demonstrates the scale of stalking as a national problem. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's 2023/2024 National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey estimates that more than 22.5 per cent of American women, or approximately 28.8 million women, have experienced stalking during their lifetimes. Around 5.5 per cent, or seven million women, reported stalking during the preceding 12 months.
The nature of that stalking is equally significant. Among female stalking victims, 78.3 per cent reported being followed, watched or spied upon, while 74.2 per cent reported being approached at locations such as their home, workplace or school when the contact was unwanted. More than four in ten reported that a perpetrator had entered their property, including their home or car, to frighten them or indicate that the perpetrator had been there. Technology has added another layer, with GPS tracking and monitoring through software and applications forming part of the contemporary stalking landscape.
The statistics also challenge the idea that stalking should be understood primarily as an unpleasant but relatively harmless form of unwanted attention. Nearly all female stalking victims surveyed by the CDC reported fear, feeling threatened or concern for their own safety or the safety of others, while more than half reported threats of physical harm. The CDC specifically identifies stalking tactics as including following - surveillance, appearing at a victim's home or workplace, unauthorised entry into a home or vehicle and technology-enabled tracking.
Thakur's case contains several of those warning signs in a single sequence. That sequence matters because violence rarely begins at the moment the weapon is produced. The weapon may be the final instrument, but the behavioural escalation can begin much earlier through surveillance, unwanted contact, intimidation, threats, property interference, unauthorised access and attempts to control the victim's movements or relationships. Treating each episode separately can obscure the cumulative risk created when the same individual repeatedly demonstrates an inability or unwillingness to accept rejection.
The American legal system does possess mechanisms designed to intervene before such conduct becomes lethal. Federal law restricts firearm possession by certain persons subject to qualifying domestic-violence protection orders, and the Department of Justice has also promoted extreme-risk protection orders as a mechanism through which courts can temporarily prevent individuals considered dangerous from accessing firearms.
The Supreme Court's 2024 decision in United States v. Rahimi also upheld the constitutionality of the federal prohibition on firearm possession by persons subject to qualifying domestic-violence restraining orders. The Department of Justice subsequently emphasised that such restrictions are intended to prevent access to firearms by individuals who have been judicially identified as posing a threat.
But the existence of legal authority is different from the effectiveness of enforcement. That distinction goes to the heart of the deterrence problem. A law can prohibit conduct, a judge can issue an order and a police officer can warn a suspect, but the preventive value of each measure depends upon what happens when the suspect disregards the first warning. If repeated violations produce no immediate and consequential intervention, the legal order risks becoming an instruction on paper rather than an effective instrument of protection.
The Department of Justice itself has recognised the importance of enforcement in stalking cases. Its guidance on anti-stalking laws recommends that protection orders and bail conditions contain clear prohibitions on direct and indirect contact, including technology and social-media contact, and emphasises that violations can result in additional criminal consequences. The guidance also stresses the importance of clearly informing offenders of those restrictions and ensuring that enforcement mechanisms are understood.
The difficulty is compounded by the nature of stalking itself. The perpetrator and victim are often not strangers. The CDC states that stalking perpetrators are most commonly intimate partners or acquaintances, meaning that the behaviour can develop within relationships or social interactions in which the victim may initially find it difficult to identify the point at which ordinary contact has become dangerous.
Technology has made that boundary even more complicated. An AirTag is an innocuous consumer product when used to locate one's own property. Placed secretly on another person's vehicle, however, the same technology can become an inexpensive surveillance mechanism. GPS systems, smartphones, cameras, social-media accounts and other connected devices have expanded the ability of an obsessive individual to establish where another person is, where that person works and how that person moves through daily life.
The challenge for law enforcement is consequently no longer limited to recognising physical following. The modern stalker can monitor without being physically present, establish patterns of movement without approaching the victim and use digital traces to maintain a sense of proximity. The CDC's latest stalking data specifically records GPS tracking, stalkerware, hidden cameras and social-media monitoring among the tactics reported by victims.
The killing of Thakur also illustrates the particular danger created when stalking intersects with America's firearm environment. The CDC recorded more than 48,000 firearm-related deaths in the United States in 2022, including both suicides and homicides. Firearms therefore remain a major mechanism through which personal conflicts, threats and acts of violence can rapidly become fatal.
The connection between stalking, coercive behaviour and firearms is recognised by the US Department of Justice. Its Office on Violence Against Women states that research has found the presence of firearms significantly increases the risk of death or serious injury in domestic or dating violence situations, particularly where firearms are used to threaten or coerce victims. This is where the question of deterrence becomes more than an abstract debate about punishment. The objective of an effective system is to intervene while the conduct remains reversible, before surveillance becomes physical confrontation and before threats become an act that cannot be undone. Once a firearm enters that sequence, the time available for prevention can shrink to seconds.
For Thakur's mother, the distinction between legal protection and actual safety became tragically concrete. Sudesh Kumari had spoken to her daughter by telephone at around 2 pm on the day of the killing. Thakur told her that she would call back in 15 minutes. She never did.
The tragedy consequently raises a question that extends beyond this individual case. When does a series of stalking incidents become sufficiently serious for authorities to treat the perpetrator as an escalating threat rather than merely as someone violating social or legal boundaries?
There is no suggestion that every stalking case will culminate in violence. Nor does every restraining order failure indicate institutional negligence. Stalking cases involve complicated factual circumstances, constitutional protections, evidentiary requirements and limitations on what police and courts can lawfully do before a crime has been established. The difficulty lies in identifying those cases where persistence is becoming fixation, fixation is becoming intrusion and intrusion is becoming a credible threat of violence. That is precisely why the cumulative pattern matters.
An AirTag beneath a car may appear minor when considered alone. Deflated tyres may appear as property interference. A person waiting outside a home may be treated as harassment. A duplicate key may transform the situation entirely. A restraining order may then mark the point at which the legal system has formally recognised the danger. When these events occur in sequence, however, they should not be viewed merely as separate incidents occupying separate pages of a police file. They form a trajectory.
The American experience demonstrates that the principal challenge in dealing with stalking is not the absence of laws alone. The United States has anti-stalking statutes, protection orders, firearm restrictions and mechanisms for removing firearms from individuals deemed dangerous. The harder question is whether those tools are deployed early enough, aggressively enough and in a sufficiently coordinated manner to prevent a known pattern of behaviour from reaching the point of irreversible violence.
Thakur's death therefore leaves behind a larger warning than the circumstances of one California shooting. It demonstrates how the erosion of personal boundaries can precede physical violence and how technology can make that erosion easier to conceal and sustain. It also demonstrates that deterrence is ultimately measured not by the existence of an order, but by whether the person who receives the order understands that violating it will produce an immediate and meaningful consequence.
The United States has spent decades developing legal responses to stalking and domestic violence. The continuing scale of stalking, the availability of firearms and the persistence of cases in which warning signs precede fatal violence suggest that the next challenge is less about recognising the problem than about closing the distance between recognition and intervention.
For victims such as Shalini Thakur, that distance can be measured not in years of legislation or pages of court orders, but in the few minutes between the first warning sign and the final act of violence.
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