NEW YORK – Richard Baumhammers, who was sentenced to death in May 2001 for killing six people, including two Indo-Americans, on a single-day shooting rampage through Pennsylvania, lost his appeal for a new trial Sept. 14.
In his 2001 trial, Baumhammers was found guilty of killing two Indian Americans — Sandeep Patel, a manager at India Grocers in Scott, Penn., and Anil Thakur of Bihar, who was shopping at the store. Thakur, 31, died on the scene, while Patel was critically injured and remained paralyzed from the neck down until he died in 2007.
Baumhammers was also found guilty of killing four others: his neighbor Anita Gordon, Thao Pham, Ji-Ye Sun, and Garry Lee. All of Baumhammers’ victims were minorities and the shooting rampage was believed to be racially motivated.
Following a three-day hearing that began Sept. 12, Allegheny County Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey A. Manning took less than three minutes to deny Baumhammers’ appeal for a new trial. During the hearing, Baumhammers’ attorney C aroline Roberto presented testimony suggesting his earlier attorneys were ineffective.
Roberto also brought in a new psychologist who concluded that Baumhammers had shown signs of mental illness as a child and was hospitalized in 1993 after a psychotic breakdown. In the 2001 trial, however, Dr. Michael Welners testified that Baumhammers did not have schizophrenia.
Baumhammers will be filing an appeal in 30 days, a source close to the case told India-West. If he again loses his appeal in the lower court, Baumhammers is next expected to appeal to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, a process which could take up to two years. He can then exhaust his federal appeals process before his death sentence is carried out, said the source.
Leena Patel, elder sister of Sandeep Patel, told India-West that Baumhammers should immediately be given the death sentence. “He made my brother suffer so much,” said Patel, noting that a decade has passed since Baumhammers was given the death sentence. “He deserves the death penalty without any further delay,” she asserted.
After surviving the shooting, in which Baumhammers walked into the store, yelled “Hey,” and then fired a shot which cut his spinal cord, Sandeep Patel lived in a hospital and nursing home for the last seven years of his life. The “baby” of the family was always surrounded by his parents and his elder siblings, said Leena Patel.
“We always had some hope that a miracle was going to happen, but the doctor told us right from the beginning, ‘there is no hope,’” she said. Sandeep Patel was studying business at a community college while working at India Grocers, owned by Leena Patel and her husband Vijay. The family had made plans to fix his marriage later that year, she said.
In the final days before his 2007 death from pneumonia, Patel returned to the ICU of a local hospital. He expressed interest in playing with his young nieces, Puja and Prachi, who could not be brought into the ICU. So Leena Patel took him to a waiting area in the hospital, where he played with his nieces.
“He was so happy then,” she proclaimed, adding that her daughters always remember their “Sandeep Uncle.” Prachi, 8, has expressed interest in becoming a neurosurgeon to help people like her uncle recover from their injuries. Patel’s parents, Manubhai and Urmila Patel, and his siblings, Bharti, Sangita and Rakesh, all live in New Jersey.
Thakur, a senior computer with Ontario-based Widecom, was originally scheduled to return to India a week before he was murdered, but his company asked him to stay on to finish a project. His wife, two children and retired parents live in Bihar.
