HERMITAGE, Pa. -- Dr. Gulam Moonda and Dr. Ernest Swanson were in the surgeon's locker room at Sharon Regional Health System, engaging in their typical good-natured banter.

Eternally upbeat, Moonda delivered his standard line when Swanson asked how he was doing.

"If I were any better, I couldn't stand it myself," Moonda said, smiling.

Moonda was especially happy this day, Thursday, May 12. He was looking forward to a weekend trip the next day to Toledo, Ohio, to look at a house his nephew, Faroq Moonda, and Faroq's wife, Afreen, were interested in buying.

Moonda had raised Faroq as a surrogate son in his home in Sharpsville, Mercer County, from the time Faroq had moved there from India when he was 14. Now Moonda was filled with pride that his nephew was about to begin a practice in anesthesiology.

"But tomorrow's Friday the 13th," Swanson said, continuing the ribbing. "It's an unlucky day."

"For me, it's a lucky day. It's bad luck for everyone else, but good luck for me."

The longtime friends, who'd worked together in the same medical building, laughed and bid each other farewell. They would never speak again.

A little more than 24 hours later, Moonda was dead, shot in the head by a robber along the Ohio Turnpike. To their horror, Faroq and Afreen came upon the crime scene in their own car a half-hour later, traveling behind the car that had carried Moonda, his wife and her mother.

Three weeks later, police continue to try to determine if Moonda, 69, a millionaire urologist, was a random victim or the target of a premeditated plot.

His wife, Donna Moonda, 46, was behind the wheel of their gold Jaguar when she stopped along the highway, about 15 miles south of Cleveland.

She said she intended to let her husband take over the driving. Moments later, she said, an unknown armed motorist pulled over, robbed her husband of his money, then shot him once before fleeing in a van.

The Ohio State Highway Patrol has been focusing on Donna Moonda as its officers investigate the killing, noting in affidavits for search warrants that she would reap financial gain. His will called for her to receive an estimated $1.2 million in cash, plus the family mansion.

When they seized the Moondas' prenuptial agreement last month, police also noted in an affidavit that the agreement could contain information that "could be a motive for the homicide of Dr. Moonda."

Her past has also given investigators pause.

Donna Moonda was prosecuted last year for stealing the powerful painkiller fentanyl from the hospital in Greenville, Mercer County, where she worked as a nurse anesthetist, smuggling the drug home where she injected it. In August, she pleaded no contest and was placed on probation after a two-month rehabilitation program at a Gateway clinic in Beaver County.

There, according to police, she met and began a relationship with Damian R. Bradford, 23, a self-described cocaine dealer who police have called "a person of interest" in Moonda's killing. He was jailed on drug charges and a probation violation after police raided his apartment.

Police say Donna Moonda bought Bradford gifts and listed herself as a cohabitant of the Center apartment where he lived. When she told her husband she was traveling to Beaver County for meetings or counseling related to her addiction, she instead went to see Bradford, police said.

Donna Moonda's lawyer, Niki Schwartz of Cleveland, has said she has been labeled a suspect by investigators but is innocent and will continue to help police solve the mystery of her husband's killing. Donna Moonda has disconnected her telephone and did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Last week, Moonda's family and friends offered a $25,000 reward for information that would solve the crime. Ohio patrol investigators planned to distribute fliers publicizing the reward in Mercer County communities.

Initial reports of Moonda's death stunned his family, colleagues and wide circle of friends who knew him from community, religious or charitable activities. The revelations of his wife's drug use and relationship with Bradford have only exacerbated their pain, confusion and grief.

What has been lost in lurid reports about Moonda's death, they say, is his life as a gentle, gregarious man devoted to family, friends, faith and medicine, as a successful professional who never forgot his modest beginnings.

"As a human being, he was the best you could find,'' said Dr. Mohammed Rashid, a general surgeon who met Moonda after moving from Altoona to Warren, Ohio, in 1989 and worshipped with him at a Youngstown, Ohio, mosque.

"It's very painful to accept that this gentleman is gone now,'' Rashid said. "It's his family's loss, of course, but it is the community's loss as well.''

A new life in America
Gulam Moonda was born into a lower-middle-class family in India's coastal state of Gujarat, the birthplace of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the father of modern India. Years later, in the United States, Moonda would proudly tell friends he walked on the same sandy beaches as Gandhi, whose philosophy of nonviolence he took to heart.

An excellent student, Moonda received scholarships to college and medical school in India. Because training in urology, his specialty, was more advanced in the United States, he left his native land to attend Albert Einstein Medical Center in Philadelphia.

Once he completed his residency, he learned that a doctors' group in Sharon was looking for a urologist. He headed west.

As the lone urologist in Mercer County at the time, his practice thrived. Not so his first marriage to a Philadelphia woman who, friends said, didn't enjoy life in rural northwestern Pennsylvania. They divorced in 1972.

That same year, Moonda purchased land in the Trout Island subdivision, a tucked-away, verdant area in Sharpsville. There he worked closely with builders to design and construct a striking contemporary home with a sweeping semi-circular driveway off Trout Island Road.

In 1979, Moonda, Swanson, an orthopedic surgeon, and three other doctors formed a partnership -- the Highland Medical Building Group -- and constructed a medical building on the Shenango Valley Freeway. The Solar Professional Center, with large solar panels comprising its A-frame roof, still houses the offices in which Moonda practiced.

While the building was being constructed, in 1980, Moonda met Donna Smouse, a 1977 graduate of Hermitage's Hickory High School. A former head cheerleader and member of the school's Health Careers club, Smouse was then working as a secretary in another physician's office.

She and Moonda began dating. Friends said he later funded Smouse's education, first at nursing school and then to be a nurse anesthetist.

During this same period, Moonda met Dr. Ravindra Sachdeva, a general surgeon and also a native of India who would become his best friend. Sachdeva found much to like in Moonda -- his zest for life, his philanthropy, his treatment of patients.

"If you were sitting here and he walked into the room he would introduce himself. He wanted to know who you were. He would joke around quite a bit," Sachdeva recalled last week.

Retired pharmaceutical representative George Gresko, 79, marveled at how Moonda recognized him and rushed to shake his hand after the two men spotted each other in a Hermitage drugstore shortly before Moonda was killed.

"I used to call on him [for work] but I hadn't seen him for probably 18 years,'' Gresko said. "He picked me right up from the other end of the store and said, 'Hello, George.' He was like me, up from the coal mines. He was a regular guy.''

Moonda grew wealthy and he appreciated the benefits his prosperity made possible. He enjoyed fashionable clothing, jewelry, luxury cars, seafood dinners with friends at the Youngstown Crab Co. and vacations.

But his friends recount dozens of examples of how he shared his wealth to help the sick, the poor, the students struggling to better themselves and the community at Masjid al-Khair Mosque, where he prayed regularly.

There was the endowed chair in Islamic studies at Youngstown State University for which he and other members of the mosque raised $500,000. There was the sick daughter of a nurse whose illness stirred him to reach in his pocket and hand several hundred dollars to the child's worried mother.

And the young boy who was brought to his care after injuring himself while riding a bicycle with no seat. He healed the boy's physical injury, then bought him a new bike.

"After that, then we all wished we had bought the boy that bicycle,'' Swanson said. "But he was the one who did it."

Sachdeva said Moonda treated his patients like "royalty," noting how he personally would hang up their coats, give them his home phone number and tell them to call him at any time.

"He portrayed ... a humanitarian quality. I could see it and hear it in the way he talked to people in the office or the hospital,'' said Joe Fortuna, a former patient and owner of The Cookery, a homey restaurant in Hermitage where Moonda was a regular for years.

"With him, it wasn't just 'What's the problem today?' and 'That's $50,' '' Fortuna said. "Without question, he was a well-liked man.''

Sachdeva and Swanson spent time outside the office with Gulam and Donna Moonda, and both men believed them to be a happy pair. After dating for about 10 years, the couple married in 1990 in a church service and a Muslim ceremony in another doctor friend's home.

"She also had a fairly bubbly personality and pretty much seemed like a nice fit," said Sachdeva, who was Moonda's best man.

"She was perky, very funny, cheerful," said Swanson. "She was an outgoing, happy individual when I first met her. And she was absolutely in love with Gulam.

"There was no hint of any marital strife whenever I saw them. They seemed happy and were always together."

The couple had no children. But in the late 1980s, Faroq Moonda, the son of Gulam's younger brother Dada, left his family in India to move in with them.

They embraced him, both bragging about his academic accomplishments and successes on the tennis team at Donna's alma mater, Hickory High School. They would become so close that, when Faroq married in 2004, he listed Gulam and Donna Moonda as his parents on his marriage license.

After graduating from Hickory in 1992, Faroq aimed to become a physician as well. Moonda wanted to pay his way, but Sachdeva said Faroq insisted on doing it on his own, a principle of self-sufficiency absorbed from the uncle he so admired.

Faroq attended the University of Pittsburgh for an undergraduate degree and then the Medical College of Pennsylvania, now part of Drexel University's College of Medicine.

He had hoped to follow in his uncle's footsteps and become a urologist but could not find a residency program, Sachdeva said. Instead, he entered the residency program in anesthesiology at Robert Wood University Hospital in New Brunswick, N.J.

Two years ago, Faroq Moonda, then 28, accompanied his uncle to a graduation party for the son of a family friend. Also in attendance was Afreen Husain, then 22, a former high school valedictorian who was attending medical school at Northeastern Ohio Universities College of Medicine. Her father, Youngstown State civil engineering professor Shakir Husain, knew the Moondas through the university and their membership at the al-Khair mosque.

Both born in India and both preparing for careers in medicine, the two young people had similar goals and drive. They married a year later, on May 23, 2004, in a week packed with personal milestones -- pre-wedding and wedding ceremonies and Afreen's graduation from medical school, then a party thrown by the Moondas at a Radisson hotel.

The two families socialized together, enjoying dinners out at Japanese and Chinese restaurants or savory meals cooked by Afreen's mother. Unwilling to move on to a residency that would force her to be separated from her husband, Afreen joined Faroq in New Jersey for the final year of his residency in anesthesiology, her father said.

With Faroq on track to finish this month, Afreen arranged to begin a residency in pathology July 1 at the Medical College of Ohio in Toledo. Faroq found a job at a nearby hospital in Findlay, Ohio.

Excited by the pending move, the couple began looking around the Toledo area for a home. Several weeks ago, they spotted a house they liked, but wanted the Moondas' opinion before making a decision, Husain said.

Looking for answers
On Friday the 13th, Moonda, his wife and mother-in-law, Dorothy Smouse, 74, set off for Ohio, planning to meet up with Faroq and Afreen at a hotel along the way.

After several stops, Donna Moonda pulled the Jaguar over to the side of the Ohio Turnpike at 6:30 p.m. to change drivers, she later told police.

Standing outside the vehicle, she said, she saw the robber attack her husband. Even so, she could not provide a description of the killer, other than his approximate height and clothing.

Police and emergency workers were still clustered around the Moondas' car 30 minutes later when Faroq and Afreen drove past.

"When they came across the incident, they saw all the ambulances,'' Shakir Husain said, his voice faltering. "Then my daughter saw Donna's mother.''

A startled Afreen also recognized the Moondas' Jaguar. The couple scrambled for a cell phone, then dialed Moonda's number. Smouse answered, sobbing.

"They were completely devastated,'' said Husain, adding that his son-in-law and daughter remain too shaken to discuss the slaying. "Donna's mother was a grandmom to him. I think they were all very close.''

Faroq ''never had any doubts'' about the Moondas' marriage, Husain said. He considered Donna to be "a motherly figure'' and was shattered by media reports detailing her involvement with drugs and police allegations of her relationship with Bradford.

"He went to her and asked, 'Why didn't you tell me this?' '' Husain said. "She told him what had been in the media. She said, 'Yes, this is true.' ''

After that painful exchange, Faroq returned to his in-laws' home, crying, Husain said.

"He said, 'There were two people [I had] in this country. One is gone and one is involved in this [a drug arrest and another relationship].' He was so sad.''

As are so many others.

Sachdeva, too, said he had no inkling of any problems in the Moondas' marriage and was shocked to hear media reports about a relationship between Donna Moonda and Bradford. He said he believes Gulam Moonda didn't know about it either.

Now he and other friends are waiting for word that police have identified Moonda's killer. An arrest, Sachdeva said, "will bring some closure to his family back home. I'm sure they're all devastated because he helped them monetarily a lot. They looked up to him. He was the elevated member of the family."

Sachdeva and others are troubled that "the death has gone to the back burner and everybody wants to hear about the scandal because maybe that makes a good story and sells newspapers or TV [advertising].

"The main focus should be on who was responsible, whoever that leads to. The police, of course, are thinking the same way and want to get this guy before he does it to somebody else."

Describing Moonda as "somebody so full of life,'' Sachdeva grinned when he recalled the 11 p.m. phone calls he would get from his friend two or three times a week. A man of strong opinions, Moonda would discuss everything from the latest hospital intrigue to his admiration for Hillary Clinton to his ire over tax cuts for rich people, including himself, who he felt should be paying more.

Moonda once explained that he carried a fair amount of money in his wallet so that "if someone robs me I want the robber to go away happy [and not hurt anyone]," Sachdeva said, shaking his head.

Equally painful for Sachdeva is another exchange involving Moonda. On the day before his death and with his trip to Toledo pending, Moonda told a colleague that he'd never been to the city. His friend described it as similar to Youngstown but larger.

"Don't tell me that," Moonda responded. "People shoot each other in Youngstown and get killed."

Sachdeva said Moonda's charity and good deeds will be his legacy.

"If you talk to 100 people in this valley I would say about 99 percent of people will feel a loss and what a tragedy it was. That speaks volumes about his involvement in the community, his generosity to people, his treating his patients so nicely.

"Some of his patients called and were crying, 'What are we going to do now?' They know there will not be another doctor like him."