Raghunandan Yandamuri, a 28-year-old Indian software engineer, has been sentenced to death for the double-murder of a 10-month-old girl and her grandmother in an apartment complex in suburban Philadelphia two years ago.
Within three-four days of the crime in October 2012, the US authorities cracked the case by arresting Yandamuri, who had kept up the charade of a grieving friend and even attended a candlelight vigil for the victims – Saanvi Venna and her grandmother, Satyavarthi Venna, 61.
At a Montgomery County Court on Tuesday, a jury of seven men and five women concurred on the death sentence for Yandamuri.
Investigations showed that Yandamuri’s original plot of kidnapping the girl in order to extract a ransom of $50,000 had gone horribly wrong, with the woman fatally stabbed and her grandchild suffocated to death. The child, abandoned in an unused basement sauna of the apartment complex, was found dead.
Yandamuri, an IT worker who came to the US from India on a work visa, plotted to kidnap the child for ransom money to feed his gambling habit, prosecutors said. He killed the child’s grandmother when she got in his way.
In making the decision, the jury considered aggravating factors such as the elements of Yandamuri’s crimes and mitigating factors such as testimony regarding his gambling addiction and mental state, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported.