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Co-worker Testifies About Slain Friend at Baumhammers Trial

Richard Baumhammers, in jacket and tie at right, is escorted into court by Allegheny County Sheriff’s deputies for the afternoon session on the first day of his trial, Friday, April 27, in Pittsburgh. Photo by Associated Press.

By Todd Spangler/AP

When Joseph Lanuka dropped off Anil Thakur at an Indian grocery one sunny afternoon last April, he said he’d be back in 10 minutes to pick him up.

Those would be the last words between the two colleagues.

A few minutes later, Thakur, an electrical engineer from India working in America on a visa, was fleeing for his life from a man prosecutors say targeted his victims because of their ethnic backgrounds.

Thakur, 31, was shot four times, three times from the rear, as Richard Baumhammers continued a 90-minute shooting rampage in Beaver and Allegheny counties in Pennsylvania on April 28, 2000.

Baumhammers, 35, of suburban Mount Lebanon, is being tried for the deaths of Thakur and four other people, and critical wounds to a sixth — Sandip Patel, who worked at the Indian grocery in Scott Township, a few miles south of Pittsburgh.

Patel, 26, who remains paralyzed, is expected to testify sometime after the trial resumes Monday.

Lanuka testified April 28, the second day of a trial in which Baumhammers’s attorneys don’t dispute he killed the victims, but said he is innocent by reason of insanity. Last Saturday was also the anniversary of the shootings, the second such rampage in less than two months in southwestern Pennsylvania.

Ronald Taylor, 40, of Wilkinsburg, is a black man accused of selecting his four white victims because of their race on March 1, 2000. He is scheduled to stand trial later this year and, like Baumhammers, faces a possible death penalty.

Lanuka, who worked with Thakur at a company which makes copiers and scanners, said he would often take the Indian man to the grocery nearby. Lanuka told Thakur he’d be back after a short trip to the bank, and when he returned, he followed police into the store and found Thakur stretched out on the floor.

“He had three or four holes in his chest, his eyes were still open and he was looking at me,” Lanuka said.

A gunshot had pierced his throat. Thakur couldn’t speak.

Prosecutors say Baumhammers, a nonpracticing immigration lawyer, harbored a hatred of nonwhite immigrants and carefully selected his victims, beginning with his neighbor, a Jewish woman, who was shot six times.

They say he drove to the Indian grocery, shooting Patel and Thakur, who died a couple of hours later at a hospital. Police say he then shot and killed two men at a Chinese restaurant and a black man outside a karate school in nearby Beaver County.

A witness, Gary Evans, said he and a friend were sitting inside a restaurant next to the Indian grocery and heard a shot. Evans said he looked out the window and saw a man pointing a handgun in the direction of man, believed to be Thakur, hiding behind a post.

“He [Baumhammers] was bouncing back and forth, trying to get a good view of the person he was trying to shoot at,” Evans said. The witness said the man with the gun fired at the other man.

Dr. Abdulrezak Shakir of the Allegheny County coroner’s office performed an autopsy on Thakur and said he was shot once in the neck, once in the back of the head and twice in the back. Two of the shots were fatal, he said.