Baumhammers killed Anita Gordon, 63, his next-door neighbor, and set fire to
her house. He then traveled to her synagogue in Scott, Beth El Congregation,
and vandalized the building, shooting out its front windows and painting swastikas
on the facade.
Baumhammers proceeded to a Scott grocery store, where he
killed Anil Thukar, 31, and left Sandeep Patel paralyzed from the neck down.
Patel died in 2007 at the age of 32.
Next he killed Ji-Ye Sun, 34, and Thao Pham, 27, at the Ya
Fei Chinese Cuisine Restaurant in Robinson before driving to C.S. Kim Karate in
Center, Beaver County, where he killed 22-year-old Garry Lee, a
African-American man from Aliquippa..
Police in Beaver County nabbed him in Ambridge after the
Center shooting.
He was convicted in May 2001 of homicide during a trial in
Allegheny County and sentenced to death.
Retired Beaver County District Attorney Anthony Berosh, who
served as co-prosecutor, said Baumhammers believed he was starting a war.
“His motive, I think, was clear: This is the beginning of a
race war,” Berosh said. “All of his targets were minority groups. Somehow in
his head he thought he could trigger this racial war. It was white versus
everybody else, and everybody else against the whites and whites would
prevail.”
Richard Baumhammers, 54, is on Pennsylvania’s death row. His
attorneys argued that he suffered from mental illness and committed the crimes
while he was delusional, something prosecutors successfully disputed.
Baumhammers isn’t set to be executed anytime soon because of
a statewide moratorium on the death penalty in Pennsylvania, much to the
chagrin of some people who knew the victims and those in law enforcement who
responded to the crime.
“It’s disappointing when so many people are left just kind
of holding this wreckage in their hands and he’s sitting in jail, OK,” is how
Jennifer Thomas puts it.
Thomas and her husband, George, live in Beaver. George
Thomas was at the Center karate studio where Baumhammers shot and killed Lee,
who was his best friend, his wife said.
Her husband won’t talk about what happened that day,
Jennifer Thomas said.
“It’s something that’s always on our minds. It’s something
that we think about an awful lot,” she said.
“It’s frustrating. I never would say I hope that person
should die, but when you look at the situation and the heartache he caused,
it’s hard to not think there’s room for justice in that situation,” she said.
Center police Chief Barry Kramer has written two letters to
Gov. Tom Wolf seeking for justice to be meted out in the Baumhammers case.
“By eliminating the death penalty, the void of closure for
victims will grow and never be filled. We believe that we must clearly
demonstrate to society that murder is an intolerable crime that will be
appropriately punished,” Kramer wrote the governor in 2015.
Kramer didn’t receive a response to that letter. He sent a
similar letter in 2016, with no response.
The governor’s office didn’t immediately respond to a
request seeking comment for this story.
All of Baumhammers’ appeals have been denied.
Berosh said there’s no question that Baumhammers, whom he
considers “totally evil,” deserved the death sentence.
“In my opinion we asked 12 of Allegheny County’s tried and
true to give him the death penalty, and they did,” he said. “For me to turn
around today and say, ‘No, don’t do that,’ would be a breach of trust in what
we asked the jurors to do in the first place.”
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