Part I: The Runaway

Around Christmas in 2014, Doe’s parents left her in charge of their home while they went to spend the holidays with extended family at a cabin in Colorado. Her two siblings, who both have children of their own, also joined. Doe wasn’t invited.

That was one of the final straws, Doe said. She no longer felt like part of the family.

By the summer of 2015, determined to find a place of her own, Doe had moved into a town home within biking distance of Wichita State with four roommates in July. Rent was low enough — $250 a month — that she could afford it with her part-time job at a pharmacy retailer. She took out student loans and enrolled in night classes.

One of her roommates was Geddam, an international student from India who earned a master’s degree in exercise science. It wasn’t long before he and Doe formed a friendship. He began giving her rides to work.

“I was friendly with her because we didn’t know who she was,” Geddam said. “But she didn’t have any belongings when she moved into the house. She didn’t have a car, so we thought that maybe she was down on her luck.”

But Doe began to feel uncomfortable around Geddam one night when he showed up to pick her up and her boyfriend was there. Geddam said he thought Doe’s boyfriend should give her a ride and thought it was inconsiderate of her to “use him” for rides.

Doe told Geddam she didn’t need a ride — that she would be fine riding her bike home. He insisted. She agreed.

Doe said after that Geddam began getting possessive. He became “uncomfortably invested” in her ex-boyfriend, who was also a Wichita State student. One night he picked her up from work, and once she was in the car he told her that he had been drinking. In an interview with The Sunflower, he insisted he only said that because he wanted to appear cool — as an offhand comment — and that he was not drunk. Doe didn’t think it was funny. She said she demanded that he let her out of the car. He didn’t.

He began sending her what she would call troubling text messages. He referred to her as his “last resort.”

Around this time, Doe received a call from the ex-boyfriend Geddam had been talking about on their car rides. Geddam had spoken to him earlier in the day at the Heskett Center and told him they were living together, Doe said. She said she had explicitly given Geddam instructions not to contact him.

Geddam said the ex-boyfriend was working at the front desk at the Heskett Center and he was showing a prospective student around the facility, and that contact between them was unavoidable. He said the ex-boyfriend pressed to obtain Doe’s address, but he refused to give it out.

“I dodged questions I also told him I’m gay (sic),” Geddam said in a text message to Doe, “how awesome is that now the whole heskett center thinks I’m gay (sic).”

The next day, Aug. 12, police escorted Geddam to ComCare after he attempted to fulfill a “premeditated plan of suicide by helium tank suffocation.” Geddam told Wichita police he was under stress from his work as a teacher at Wichita State.

After undergoing a mental health evaluation, Geddam was allowed to return to the town home where he and Doe both lived. Doe said she suspected him of coming into her bedroom while she was sleeping when he returned.

“I would wake up to the door closing, or the floor boards creaking,” Doe said.

In total, Doe said Geddam entered her room three times without her permission. The third time, Geddam left two letters on the carpet inside her door at the top of the stairs — one addressed to her, the other addressed to her boyfriend at the time.

Included in the letters, Geddam asked Doe: “Would you look over my colour and my form and marry me because I want to rededicate my life to Christ and to you? … These are my genuine feelings.”

Doe called the police.

Geddam denied to The Sunflower that he meant what he wrote in the letters. He said he wanted to give Doe an opportunity to say if she had feelings for him without feeling rejected, because he believed at the time that she was interested in him.

Geddam would later tell police he believed Doe to be “a spy sent by his parents” in India, according to the police report filed in the case.

At the encouragement of Wichita police, Doe moved out of the house. Curtis Mitchell had just been sentenced for the murder of local celebrity chef Tanya Tandoc, owner of Tanya’s Soup Kitchen, and one of the officers on the scene told Doe he didn’t want to see her meet the same end, Doe said.

Aug. 20, Sedgwick County judge granted Doe an Ex Parte Order of Protection from Stalking. Just two months after moving into the town home with four roommates, Doe found herself in a new living situation: she moved into a battered women’s shelter.

But that was only the start of her troubles.