Judge sentences convicted shooter
With the entire courtroom standing except the stenographer, Richard S. Baumhammers heard an Allegheny County judge Thursday sentence him five times to death by lethal injection for a hate-inspired shooting spree last year.
Common Pleas Judge Jeffrey Manning told Baumhammers he deserved the five consecutive death sentences, plus 112 &*#189; to 225 years in prison, for attacks on people whose 'only misdeed was that they were different from you.'
In a rare proceeding, Manning had ordered everyone present to rise with him as he passed sentence. Only court stenographer Gary Kushner remained seated as he recorded the death sentences.
The judge looked down at Baumhammers.
'May God have mercy on your soul,' Manning said.
In May, a jury convicted Baumhammers, 36, a suspended Mt. Lebanon attorney, on five counts of first-degree murder. The jury rejected defense claims that Baumhammers was too mentally ill to know what he was doing when he killed five people and left a sixth paralyzed in a shooting spree in Allegheny and Beaver counties on April 28, 2000.
| The victims |
 Ji-Ye Sun, 34, of Churchill, managed Ya Fei Chinese Cuisine in Robinson Town Centre, who was married and had two stepchildren. Sun was a native of China.  Anita 'Nicki' Gordon, 63, of Mt. Lebanon, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, worked as an interior designer and helped decorate part of the synagogue, Beth El Congregation.  Anil Thakur, 31, an electrical engineer and father of two who had just days left on his visa when he was shot. Thakur was a native of India.  Garry Lee, 22, of Beaver County, a 1996 graduate of Aliquippa High School, was planning to attend business school.  Thao Pham, 27, of Castle Shannon, a father of one, who survived a shipwreck that killed his father and others when they fled Vietnam in 1979. He worked at Ya-Fei Chinese Restaurant, where he was killed.  Sandip Patel, 26, of Plum Borough, co-owner of India Grocery Store. In the last year, he has been in and out of the hospital. He was shot twice and today is a parapeligic. Patel was the only survivor. Source: Police reports, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review research
|
1:30 p.m.: Richard S. Baumhammers (right) leaves his Mt. Lebanon home then shoots his neighbor, Anita 'Nikki' Gordon, 63, then fired shots into the window of the Beth El Synagogue on Conchran Road. With Manning's formal declaration, Baumhammers became the 245th person on Pennsylvania's death row. Three people have been executed in Pennsylvania since 1995.
Manning took about 10 minutes to impose additional consecutive terms on 20 other charges, including attempted homicide and aggravated assault on Sandeep Patel, 26, who was shot and paralyzed at the India Grocers in Scott Township.
In addition, consecutive terms were imposed for ethnic intimidation, institutional vandalism at two synagogues, reckless endangerment, arson, simple assault and a firearms violation.
The judge noted that Baumhammers was voluntarily committed to St. Clair Memorial Hospital in Mt. Lebanon nine days after buying a .357-caliber Magnum revolver at a Washington County gun shop on April 30, 1999. Manning decried the lack of a mechanism that would have triggered notification of law enforcement.
'It seems that this commonwealth is in dire need of a reporting requirement imposed upon mental health providers to ask their patients if they possess a firearm and to notify law enforcement in the event of a mental commitment,' he said.
Manning also said Baumhammers tapped into the Internet, logging on to hate group Web sites.
'Coaxed and coached by the mongers of venom and violence, the defendant here became a witting tool of fanatical racism,' Manning said.
Defense attorney Thomas Farrell, who will handle the appeal, asked for additional time to file post-trial motions. Manning will have 120 days to rule after the motions are filed.
The death penalty cases will automatically go to the state Supreme Court for review, while the non-fatal charges take another path beginning with the state Superior Court.
Asked if he had anything to say before sentencing, Baumhammers, who had tried unsuccessfully to be declared innocent by reason of insanity, said, 'I have no comment, your honor.'
'On the morning of April 28, 2000, six people arose to their lives, free citizens of this world without fear or trepidation, they surrendered themselves to their daily chores,' Manning told Baumhammers, 'unaware that they were indiscriminately marked by you for death.
'One can hardly imagine the terror that you set upon them when you chose to select them as targets of your demented hate.
'Some of them froze. Some of them ran. The last thing they saw was your face, your gun, your finger on the trigger, and by the time you were stopped in the swath of your brutal path, five lay dead and a sixth permanently and brutally paralyzed.'
Chief Trial Deputy Edward Borkowski said Baumhammers' ethnic hatred led to the killings, not mental illness.
The legacy of the case is not Baumhammers' mental state, but rather the pain inflicted on the victims and their survivors, who will reflect on the tragedy for the rest of their lives, Borkowski said.
Speaking with emotion, the prosecutor said he had blocked out the case since the guilty verdicts, 'because of the pain surrounding it.'
Borkowski spoke of the professional aspirations and personal travails that led many of the victims from foreign lands to America.
Two members of the victims' families spoke at the sentencing. Annette Gordon, daughter of Baumhammers' next-door neighbor, Anita 'Nicki' Gordon, 63, said she had 'a hole in my heart because of what Richard did.'
Zetta Lee, of Aliquippa, mother of Garry Lee, 22 - who was shot and killed as he worked out at the C.S. Kim Karate Studio in Center Township, Beaver County - said her son's death has devastated his friends and family, especially his younger sister Lazett, 10.
If Baumhammers had bothered to talk to her son, she knows he would have changed his mind about shooting him, she said.
Lee added that Baumhammers 'deserves what he gets.'
Defense attorneys said Baumhammers was psychotic and his fixation on minorities resulted from delusions that he was being followed, shot with lasers and otherwise persecuted by often nameless, faceless entities.
'What is so shameful is ... you don't kill mentally ill people. There was no question that Richard was mentally ill when all of this happened. I think it's a sad day,' defense attorney William Difenderfer said outside the courtroom.
'It's like a lynching of the town fool.'
Baumhammers' parents, Andrejs and Inese Baumhammers, both Mt. Lebanon dentists, couldn't bear to come to court, Difenderfer said.
The Baumhammers issued a statement of sympathy to the victims. The parents also said they are 'disappointed that their psychotic mentally-ill son' was sentenced to death.
'Since 1993, Richard has suffered from a well-documented delusion(al) disorder of the persecutory type and for the rest of his life should be in a prison for the criminally insane,' the statement said.
Farrell, a former assistant U.S. prosecutor, said he will raise every legal claim he can to keep Baumhammers from being executed.
'I agree that these senseless killings and maiming of Mr. Patel has caused tremendous pain to the families and the community. I don't think any of that will be healed by executing a mentally ill man who committed those acts.'
Donald W. Wuerl, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Pittsburgh, said in a statement that the death penalty 'diminishes our society's commitment to recognize the dignity and worth of all human life, even of a person convicted of the terrible destruction of human life.'
He said life imprisonment without parole allows a convict to 'come to terms with the evil that has been committed and even to ask for forgiveness and reconciliation.'
Kishor Pokharna, who has contact with murder victim Anil Thakur's family and knows Patel, said he does not support the death penalty.
'It's so sad because an eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind. Then the question is, 'Do we want to live in a blind world?'' he said.
Pokharna said Thakur's parents are 'devastated because in India they do not have a social security system like in America. In India, children are our social security.
'For them, it doesn't matter because already they lost their son,' he said.
Robert Baird can be reached at (412) 391-8650. Tim Puko can be reached at (412) 320-7975. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
