Michigan man will repent for the rest of his life in jail.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Lakshmivasa Nerusu, the Michigan man on trial for having killed his wife and two children before fleeing to India in 2008, has been found guilty of first-degree murder in each of their killings.
Nerusu was found guilty by a jury of his peers in Oakland Circuit Court on Thursday, bringing to an end his trial, unless he appeals. The jury needed less than two hours to hand down their guilty verdict, meaning that Nerusu now faces the likelihood of life in prison without parole for his gruesome crime.
According to the case, Nerusu and his wife, 37 year-old Jayalakshmi Nerusu, had a very intense argument on the morning of October 13, 2008, in their home in Novi, a suburb of Detroit. This argument drove Nerusu to kill his wife by stabbing her repeatedly in the kitchen of their home – estimates say it was nearly 60 times.
Nerusu also slit his wife’s throat, something he also did to kill his 14 year-old daughter, Tejasvi, and 12 year-old son, Siva Kumar, as both children returned from school, the same day.
Nerusu and his defense team argued that he was insane, and that he had suffered some kind of mental blackout during that day. While they never denied that Nerusu killed his family – forensic evidence ultimately proved too damning to refute that – Nerusu claimed that everything he did happened during his memory lapse, meaning that he had no control over his actions and could not be held accountable.
Testimony from the trial painted an unhappy family portrait. According to local ABC affiliate WXYZ, Nerusu was a mathematician with a job that paid as much as a $100 an hour, but he ultimately lost that and much more after the crash of 2008. The family lost more than $100,000 in savings, Nerusu’s car was repossessed, and the family was struggling to pay the bills and keep up with the rent on their apartment.
As a result, Nerusu wanted to move the family back to India, something his wife was not in favor of. They had several arguments about this, and the marriage was, at times, violent.
After the killings, records show that Nerusu paid $975 for a one-way ticket back to India – a ticket that prosecutors say was the absolute first one available given the time when the family had been murdered.
Now, Nerusu will stay in jail and await his sentencing, which will almost certainly be to spend the rest of his life behind bars, without the chance of ever being free again. He is scheduled to be sentenced on July 3.