Manju Gurung Poonmagar, a 37-year-old Nepalese woman from Marietta, was coming home from her shift at a BP station near Windy Hill Road in the final hours of December 31, 2013, when her life was cut short. Police were called to Westminster Square Apartments after reports of a vehicle crash and found her in the driver’s seat with a gunshot wound after her car had careened into a parked vehicle inside the complex where she lived. Neighbors later remembered her as hardworking and honest, details that gave the case a particularly intimate sadness because the violence had erupted at the very place she should have been safest, just after she returned home from work. Although some memorial databases list January 2, 2014 as the date of death, the contemporaneous local reporting places the shooting and discovery of her body in the early hours of December 31, 2013, in Marietta.
In the first days after the killing, the case appeared to be a baffling apartment-complex homicide. That changed on January 10, 2014, when Cobb County police announced the arrest of Sergio Vera-Lule, a 26-year-old Smyrna man, charging him with murder in Poonmagar’s death. Reporting at the time said investigators also tied him to a string of armed robberies in the Marietta area, making her killing part of a larger burst of violence rather than an isolated act. The arrest gave the case a suspect quickly, but it also deepened the horror of what had happened: Poonmagar was not described as someone entangled in a personal feud or long-running dispute, but as a working woman who was allegedly targeted in the course of a predatory crime spree.
The fuller account emerged later in court. According to later coverage citing the Cobb County District Attorney’s Office, Vera-Lule admitted that during a meth-fueled series of robberies and attempted robberies across Cobb County, he followed Poonmagar from the BP station at 475 Windy Hill Road to her apartment complex at 2401 Windy Hill Road. Once there, prosecutors said, he tried to rob her and shot her in the head, killing her instantly. That account turned the case from a mysterious killing into a grim narrative of pursuit: she finished work, drove home, and was followed into her own parking lot by a man looking for one more victim.
The case ultimately ended not with a trial verdict but with a guilty plea. In August 2015, a little more than nineteen months after the killing, Vera-Lule pleaded guilty in Cobb County Superior Court to charges tied to the crime spree, including the murder of Poonmagar, and received a life sentence. Contemporary reports describe the sentence as the punishment for a two-week robbery spree that culminated in her death. So in terms of suspects and arrests, the public record points to one identified suspect, one arrest, and one conviction: Sergio Vera-Lule was arrested, charged, and later sentenced to life in prison for the killing of Manju Gurung Poonmagar.
