Oct. 15: A 28-year-old techie from Andhra Pradesh, who was addicted to gambling, has been sentenced to death in the US for the gruesome killing of a family friend’s baby and her grandmother in a 2012 kidnapping plot gone wrong.

Raghunandan Yandamuri, who had stuffed a handkerchief into the toddler’s mouth to make her stop crying and put her inside a suitcase before dumping the body, had last week told the judge that he would rather take the death penalty than sit through sentencing hearings. He had maintained his innocence throughout, showing no emotion even when the jurors were moved to tears as evidence of his crime was presented.

Yandamuri, an IT professional, who migrated from Visakhapatnam on a work visa, was convicted of first-degree murder for stabbing Satyavathi Venna, 61, and suffocating Saanvi, her 10-month-old granddaughter, in their Pennsylvania flat in October 2012.

Prosecutors said Yandamuri who had plotted to kidnap the child for $50,000, killed the grandmother when she got in his way. The police had then said Yandamuri flung 10 copies of the ransom note in the flat after the murders.

“I felt that if he had expressed remorse, he would have had a better chance at saving his life,” Yandamuri’s attorney in the sentencing phase, Henry Hilles, said.

Samantha Cauffman, deputy district attorney of Montgomery county where the trial was held, said the sentence was what the victims’ family wanted. “It’s not going to give them back what they lost, but it is a sense of closure for them,” Cauffman said.

Yandamuri’s mother Padmavathi, 52, blamed her son’s fate on his gambling. “I pity my son. He got into bad habits (gambling), which ruined his family life and finally drove him to crime and now death,” Padmavathi said.

Yandamuri had married Komali, an Andhra native, who lived with him in the US. His father Surendranath, a constable, was killed in a Maoist attack in 1997.

In Guntur, the Vennas said “justice had been done”. “He attacked my old mother. But there was no need to kill baby girl Saanvi,” said Madhukar Venna, the brother of Venkata, the baby’s father.

Others voiced shock. “The incident shows we can’t trust even a person from our region,” said Vijayawada’s R.V. Gopal Rao, whose children are in the US. But Rao felt Yandamuri should have been given a life term.

The case also highlighted the need for able guardians for Indian families in the US. “Leaving children in the care of aged parents is no more a solution,” said a spokesperson for the Telugu Association of North Andhra (TANA).