Sri Satya Krishna Chitturi, a 27-year-old Indian male, had only recently arrived in the United States when his life was cut short in Talladega County near Sylacauga. He was working as a clerk at the Crown Service Station on Old Birmingham Highway in Oak Grove when, according to investigators and local reporting, a robbery unfolded during the night of February 9, 2022. Deputies were dispatched the next morning, February 10, at about 9:45 a.m. on a report of a possible robbery, and when they entered the store they found Chitturi unresponsive inside. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and authorities said an undetermined amount of money had been taken from the business. Reporting tied to his family’s fundraiser said he was a student, had been in America for only about a month, and left behind a pregnant wife as his family faced the shock of sending his body back to India.
In the first days after the killing, the case carried the feel of a sudden ambush in an ordinary place. The sheriff’s office released surveillance images and described the suspect as a slender Black male, roughly 6 feet to 6 feet 2 inches tall, dressed in black clothing and seen with an Air Jordan backpack and black-and-white Nike shoes. Rewards were offered for information, reflecting how urgently investigators were trying to identify whoever walked into that station and left Chitturi dead behind the counter. The public picture that emerged was not of a long-running feud or a personal dispute, but of a robbery that turned fatal, leaving a young man’s future erased in a single shift at work.
There was movement in the investigation a month later. On March 14, 2022, the Talladega County Sheriff’s Office announced that a person of interest had been arrested, but not on Chitturi’s homicide itself. Authorities said that person was being held in the Talladega County Jail on unrelated felony charges while the investigation continued. Just as striking was what officials did not say: they did not publicly release the person of interest’s identity in the reporting that followed, and the available online sources located here do not show a later public announcement of murder charges, a trial, or a conviction in Chitturi’s case. So the most documented outcome from the sources is that investigators identified a person of interest and had that person in custody on separate charges, while the killing itself remained, at least in the public record available here, without a clearly reported final courtroom resolution.
