Jury can deliberate for hours, but Yandamuri deserves it.
By Sujeet Rajan
NEW YORK: A juror was ‘incapacitated’ suddenly last evening after six hours of deliberations and was replaced by a new one on Thursday morning, which meant fresh round of ‘reconstituted’ jury deliberations. That’s the only reason why Raghunandan Yandamuri has not been dealt with the death penalty by now for murdering 10-month-old infant Saanvi Venna and her grandmother Satyavathi Venna, 61, who was visiting from India to take care of her, in the Marquis apartments in King of Prussia, Philadelphia, two years ago.
The murder trial of the 28-year-old Yandamuri, a former Information technology worker who emigrated from India on an H-1B visa, seems like an open and shut case. Despite all the antics he has displayed in court, including representing himself and appealing for hours to the jurors as his court-appointed lawyer looked on from the side lines, there is overwhelming evidence to suggest he committed the murders in a pre-meditated manner.
Yandamuri say the murders were committed by two white men, who coerced him at gunpoint to help them enter the house of the victims to kidnap Saanvi. They threatened him with dire consequences, told him his wife would also be harmed if he didn’t cooperate with them. Yandamuri had many choices, which anybody in their right mind would have taken up if dealt with the same predicament. Not help two strange men commit robbery, kidnapping and murder of a family he knew as close friends.
Here were some common sense choices: Yandamuri had three days to inform the family of the victims, who were close friends of his about the dire threat; go to the police and tell them about this threat, help them nab the two wannabe criminals; or just fly to India with his wife if he felt he wanted to be out of that scenario, and not be in the thick of what turned out to be a kidnapping for ransom plot gone horribly awry.
Instead what did Yandamuri do, or at least what he says he did.
After he was supposedly confronted by these two men, he acquiesced with their demands, to kidnap Saanvi. He went along with them, knocked on the door bell of the victims’ apartment. Satyavathi Venna recognized him. Opened the door with smile, to let a family friend in. The three men barged in. Satyavathi Venna was stabbed to death. Saanvi’s mouth was stuffed; she was wrapped in cloth and then shoved into a suitcase. Her body was found days later.
Yandamuri had the decency to at least confess to robbery: the ‘innocent’ and ‘scared’ Yandamuri found time at that time as the men were inside the house, kidnapping and murdering, to steal the gold bangles off Satyavathi Venna as she lay in a pool of blood, life having ebbed from her, or ebbing away from her. One bangle at a time. One of the bangles even got stuck as he tugged. But this man from Andhra Pradesh was determined. He tugged harder. After all, as he admitted in court, like he admitted to the act of stealing the bangles of a woman he knew, he had a ‘small’ gambling habit.
“You took bangles off a dead woman,” Montgomery County Deputy District Attorney Samantha Cauffman said, questioning Yandamuri. “You took them off one by one.”
“This person forced me to take off the bangles,” said Yandamuri, in his explanation to that abominable act.
What is also well known by now, is that Yandamuri had a gambling habit. He was $20,000 in debt, playing blackjack at the Valley Forge Casino, as prosecutors revealed. He was borrowing from friends; was in financial trouble. Kidnapping Saanvi for ransom was a way out for him, or at least that’s what he foolishly thought.
He blames police detectives for cherry picking evidence to support their theory that he committed the murders. But Yandamuri didn’t tell the jurors that he had confessed to the crimes to the police early on in the investigation, and had given them precise information as to where they would find Saanvi’s body. The body was found exactly where he told them.
Prosecutors have presented video surveillance from the hours and days after the murders in which Yandamuri appeared calm as he went to Walmart alone to buy a suitcase, and to the Valley Forge Casino Resort to play blackjack, reported The Inquirer. There were no two men in those videos as Yandamuri claimed. They appear to be fictitious characters. And even if they exist, what are the chances that they were two men that Yandamuri hired to help him execute his heinous plan? Very high, one would think. How often do immigrants in this country get accosted by two strange men one fine day to help them kidnap, rob and murder, and the immigrant go along happily with that plan?
The only thing in Yandamuri’s favor, of escaping the death penalty for life in prison: a small element of doubt created by his pointing out that a partial footprint and hair were evidence of an unknown person at the crime scene.
Yandamuri told jurors at his closing arguments on Wednesday: “This is a very terrible thing. Whoever did it, they should be given very big punishment.”
That’s right. It’s a terrible crime: devastated the lives of multiple families here and in India, made friends question each others’ loyalties; makes one fear one’s neighbor; the world a less safe place to live in, with people like Yandamuri around.
The ‘big punishment’ as Yandamuri appealed to the jury to be delivered to those behind this crime, should be the death penalty. To Raghunandan Yandamuri.