Kansas Man Who Murdered Indian Engineer In Hate Crime Gets Three Life Sentences

A photo of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, the 32-year-old Indian engineer killed at a bar in Olathe, Kansas, is pictured during a peace vigil in Bellevue, Washington on March 5, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / Jason Redmond (Phot... A photo of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, the 32-year-old Indian engineer killed at a bar in Olathe, Kansas, is pictured during a peace vigil in Bellevue, Washington on March 5, 2017. / AFP PHOTO / Jason Redmond (Photo credit should read JASON REDMOND/AFP/Getty Images) MORE LESS
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The Kansas man who yelled “Get out of my country!” before murdering Srinivas Kuchibhotla and injuring two others in February of last year was given three consecutive life sentences Tuesday, according to Kansas City’s KSHB

“If you could have kept your anger inside and spoke to my husband softly, Srinu would have been more than happy to share his background and help you understand that not every brown skinned person is suspicious or evil, but kind, smart and contributing to America,” Kuchibhotla’s widow, Sunayana Dumala, said in a statement read in court Tuesday, according to the Kansas City Star.

“Instead you chose to rage and bully in anger and when you were stopped, you decided to take their lives.”

Adam Purinton pleaded guilty to three federal hate crime charges in May.

Aside from the federal charges, Purinton pleaded guilty in March to premeditated first-degree murder and two counts of attempted premeditated first-degree murder. Two others, Kuchibhotla’s friend Alok Madasani and bystander Ian Grillot, were injured in the shooting. Kuchibhotla and Madasani worked as aviation systems engineers at Garmin.

In May, a Kansas judge sentenced Purinton to life without the possibility of parole for 50 years for the murder, in addition to 14 years for each of the attempted murders.

The racially motivated murder made international headlines, with Kuchibhotla’s body being transported back to Hyderabad, India, where his family lived, for a funeral, and Indian diplomats pledging to monitor the investigation of the shooting.

“I had asked him to return to India if he was feeling insecure there. But he used to say he was safe and secure,” Kuchibhotla’s mother, Parvatha Vardhini, said at the funeral.

The White House said at the time that it was “absurd” to link the attack to the newly inaugurated President’s racist and xenophobic language about immigrants. A few days later, then-White House press secretary Sean Spicer said “The President condemns these and any other racially or religiously motivated attacks in the strongest terms.”

“Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week’s shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms,” Trump said in his first address to a joint session of Congress in February last year.

“What happened that night was a senseless crime that took away my best friend,” Madasani had said at a vigil a day earlier. “I wish it was a dream.”

This post has been updated.

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