Purdue Parent Nightmares Turn Into Real-Life Rotten Surprises

A Hoosier Enquirer follow-up: Our first look at tragedies involving Indiana college students inadvertently left Purdue out. History tells us that was a significant omission.

20-year-old Varun Manish Chheda, deceased

These aren't reasons to fear Purdue. They are reminders of something parents understand instinctively: sending a child to college requires an extraordinary act of trust. Most of Lafayette seems quite run down and dangerous after dark, even.

The goodnight text that became a family's last

Perhaps no Purdue story captures that parental nightmare more painfully than the 2022 murder of Varun Manish Chheda.

Chheda was 20 years old, a senior studying data science and living in McCutcheon Hall. His parents described a son who remained remarkably close to his family despite being away at college. He called his mother between classes, exchanged Wordle results and routinely checked in morning and night.

On October 4, his mother sent the kind of message millions of parents have sent to college children: eat well, sleep well and finish your homework.

He responded that he had.

His final message to her came at 11:45 p.m.: "Goodnight, Mama."

Hours later, police officers arrived at his family's Indianapolis home. Chheda had been stabbed to death inside his Purdue dormitory room. His roommate, Ji Min "Jimmy" Sha, called 911 and was subsequently arrested and charged with the murder. Purdue's police chief characterized the attack as unprovoked. (ABC News)

Think about that from a parent's perspective. A dormitory room is supposed to be one of the safest places a student has. Parents pay universities for housing partly because residence halls represent structure, security and community.

For the Chheda family, that expectation was shattered in a matter of hours. “His parents were the luckiest and blessed to have him as a son. He was the most caring and protective brother who played tricks galore and was his sister’s biggest champion,” according to his obituary.

Andrew Boldt went to class and never came home

Eight years earlier, Purdue experienced another horrifying killing, this time in the middle of the academic day.

On January 21, 2014, Andrew "Drew" Boldt, a 21-year-old senior in electrical and computer engineering, was killed inside Purdue's Electrical Engineering Building.

This wasn't a student wandering into some dangerous neighborhood miles from campus. Boldt was where parents expect their children to be: inside an academic building at Purdue.

Purdue President Mitch Daniels wrote afterward that the crime had left the West Lafayette campus "stunned and saddened" and offered condolences to Boldt's parents and family. (Purdue Engineering)

Professor Dave Meyer remembered Boldt as one of his brightest students and one of his most dependable undergraduate teaching assistants. Meyer subsequently established the Andrew Boldt "3-Z" Teaching Award in his memory. (Purdue Engineering)

Buildings reopen. Classes resume. New students eventually walk the same hallways without remembering what occurred there. Families don't have that luxury.

Wade Steffey simply disappeared

Then there is Wade Steffey, whose 2007 disappearance became one of the most unsettling mysteries in Purdue history.

Steffey was a 19-year-old freshman when he disappeared during the early morning hours of January 13. Purdue, police, family members and volunteers searched for him.

Days became weeks.

Weeks became months.

His parents were trapped in perhaps the cruelest position imaginable—not knowing whether their son was alive, injured, abducted or somewhere waiting to be found.

Then came the rotten surprise.

On March 19, more than two months after Steffey disappeared, his body was discovered inside a high-voltage electrical room in Owen Hall.

Purdue commissioned an independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding his death and the search. The resulting report found evidence supporting the conclusion that Steffey was intoxicated and documented circumstances suggesting impaired judgment before his death. (Purdue University)

Authorities concluded that his death was an accidental electrocution.

The Steffey case remains particularly haunting because the missing freshman hadn't vanished into some distant wilderness. He was ultimately found on Purdue's own campus.

For every parent who has ever stared at a telephone because a child hadn't called when promised, the Steffey story is difficult to forget.

Purdue's darkest day came long before cellphones

Modern parents can text their children, track phones and receive emergency alerts almost instantaneously.

Imagine being a Purdue parent in 1903.

On Halloween morning that year, a special 14-car train left carrying roughly 1,000 Purdue students, administrators, supporters and the university's football team and staff toward Indianapolis for the Indiana-Purdue football game.

At approximately 9:45 a.m., the Purdue train collided with coal cars.

The first passenger coach—carrying the football team—was devastated.

Seventeen people ultimately died. Purdue's archival history records football players among the victims along with a trainer, assistant coach, student manager and a Lafayette businessman and Purdue supporter. Many others suffered serious injuries. (Purdue University Archives)

Purdue itself has described the wreck as one of the university's greatest tragedies. The university's historical account notes that at least 40 passengers were injured, including 22 football players. (Purdue Stories)

The rest of the season was canceled.

More than 120 years later, the dead remain physically represented at Purdue. Memorial Gymnasium, now Felix Haas Hall, was constructed in their memory, and its entrance contains 17 steps—one for each person who died. (Purdue Stories)

Generations of students have walked those steps. Many probably never knew why there are exactly 17. Colleges want to bury, so to speak, their dark days, mistakes, and horror stories, looking forward to their futures as well as those of most of their graduates.

Then football suffered another deadly disaster

Thirty-three years later, tragedy struck Purdue football again.

On September 12, 1936, an explosion in a shower room at Purdue's Ross Camp training facility, about 10 miles west of campus, severely burned six football players.

Two ultimately died.

Purdue Athletics records the incident in its official football history as the second major tragedy to strike the program. (Purdue Sports)

Again, consider the parents. They had sent their sons to Purdue to study and play football. The young men went to practice. Two never came home.

What these stories do—and don't—say about Purdue

There is an important distinction to make.

This is not evidence that Purdue is an unusually dangerous university. With tens of thousands of students today and a history stretching back to the 19th century, isolated tragedies accumulated across more than a century should not be used to suggest that today's Purdue campus is inherently unsafe.

That would be unfair to the university and statistically misleading.

But erasing tragedy is equally wrong.

Universities celebrate Nobel-caliber research, championship seasons, famous alumni, new buildings and billion-dollar fundraising campaigns. Families experience universities differently. They remember the dorm room their daughter lived in, the professor who changed their son's life, the first football game they attended together—and sometimes the telephone call that divided their lives permanently into before and after.

That is why these names matter: Varun Chheda. Andrew Boldt. Wade Steffey.

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And behind the names are parents who once did exactly what thousands of Indiana families do every August.

They loaded clothes into cars. They carried boxes into residence halls. They probably worried about grades, roommates, drinking, dating, money and whether their child would remember to call home.

Then they drove away from West Lafayette.

For almost every Purdue family, that journey eventually ends with graduation photographs, careers and another generation of Boilermakers.

For a very small number, the nightmare every parent tries not to imagine became real.

That doesn't diminish Purdue.

Remembering them honors the students who never got the chance to become alumni.

And it corrects an omission from our first story that should not have happened.

Purdue belongs in Indiana's history of campus tragedy—not because tragedy defines the university, but because the students who were lost were Boilermakers, too.

Still HE blames this school for Indiana's first female Chief Justice DEI RINO Loretta Rush, who has single handedly destroyed the legal profession and access to justice in Indiana.