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He yelled 'Get out of my country, ' witnesses say, and then shot 2 thieves of American jobs from India, killing one

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This man is a hero and should go free.

Authorities in Kansas filed first-degree murder charges against 
a man accused of opening fire in a bar there, killing one Indian 
man, injuring two other people and causing fears about bigotry 
to reverberate across the globe.

According to witness accounts, the gunman reportedly told two of 
the people who were shot — both Indian men who work for Garmin, 
the technology firm — to “get out of my country” before opening 
fire and had also used racial slurs during the Wednesday evening 
shooting.

Multiple law enforcement agents launched an investigation into 
the deadly shooting inside Austin’s Bar and Grill in Olathe, a 
city about 20 miles southwest of Kansas City. Even as 
authorities said they had not yet identified a motive for the 
attack, relatives of the Indian men said they feared the 
shooting was connected to a climate of fear and xenophobia in 
America.

The father of one of the people injured pointed to the election 
of President Trump, who has routinely described a threat posed 
to Americans from people outside the country’s borders, and 
pleaded with parents in India “not to send their children to the 
United States.”

The White House responded by calling the link to Trump’s 
rhetoric absurd, according to Reuters.

Police identified the suspected attacker in Olathe as Adam W. 
Purinton, 51, and said he was taken into custody in Missouri a 
little more than a day after the shooting.

One of the Indian men shot during the attack — Srinivas 
Kuchibhotla, 32 — died in the hospital later from his wounds, 
the Olathe police said. The other — Alok Madasani, 32, of 
Overland Park, Kan. — was released from the hospital Thursday.

The shooting also injured 24-year-old Ian Grillot, another 
patron at Austin’s, who apparently tried to intervene.

Witnesses told the Kansas City Star and The Washington Post that 
Purinton was thought to have been kicked out of the bar 
Wednesday night before the shooting took place.

“He seemed kind of distraught,” Garret Bohnen, a regular at 
Austin’s who was there that night, told The Post in an 
interview. “He started drinking pretty fast.”

He reportedly came back into the bar and hurled racial slurs at 
the two Indian men, including comments that suggested he thought 
they were of Middle Eastern descent. When he started firing 
shots, Grillot, a regular at the bar whom Bohnen called 
“everyone’s friend,” moved to get involved.

Authorities have not released many details about the attack. 
They have not said the shooting was a hate crime, instead saying 
they are investigating to see if it was spurred by bias. During 
a briefing Thursday, officials cautioned that it was still early 
in the investigation and declined to offer a motive for the 
shooting.

“As far as the motivation in this case and the facts surrounding 
it … what we want to do is we want to be able to be sure of our 
facts versus speculation,” Johnson County District Attorney 
Stephen M. Howe said at the briefing.

On Friday afternoon, Howe noted that Kansas has no hate crime 
statute, saying that such charges would have to be federal:

Kuchibhotla and Madasani are both Indian nationals, a spokesman 
for India’s Ministry of External Affairs said.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj said in tweets that she 
had contacted Kuchibhotla’s family, in the southern city of 
Hyderabad, and was making arrangements to have his remains sent 
there.

“I have spoken to the father and Mr. K. K. Shastri brother of 
Srinivas Kuchibhotla in Hyderabad and conveyed my condolences to 
the family,” she tweeted. Two diplomats from the Indian 
Consulate in Houston were “rushing” to Kansas to assist, Swaraj 
said.

[‘I appeal to all the parents in India not to send their 
children’ to the U.S., distraught father says after shooting]

The U.S. Embassy in New Delhi also released a statement 
condemning the shooting. Chargé d’Affaires MaryKay Carlson 
called it “a tragic and senseless act,” adding that the United 
States is a “nation of immigrants and welcomes people from 
across the world to visit, work, study, and live.”

Family members of the two men said in interviews that they 
feared the current atmosphere in the United States.

“There is a kind of hysteria spreading that is not good because 
so many of our beloved children live there,” said Venu Madhav, a 
relative of Kuchibhotla. “Such hatred is not good for people.”

Madhav said that “something has changed in the United States.”

Relatives of the two Indian men shot Wednesday told the 
Hindustan Times that they were friends who had not antagonized 
Purinton, and that Purinton had instead “picked an argument” 
with them and suggested they were illegally in the country.

“They tried to tell him that they had done their [master’s 
degrees] in Kansas in 2006 and had been staying there with valid 
work permits,” a relative said.

[Three Kansas men calling themselves ‘Crusaders’ charged in 
terror plot targeting Muslim immigrants]

Madasani’s father, Jaganmohan Reddy, told the Times he has 
recently begun to ask his son to return home, fearing that he 
might not be safe in the country’s racially charged atmosphere, 
with ugly incidents and hate groups on the rise.

“The situation seems to be pretty bad after Trump took over as 
the U.S. president. I appeal to all the parents in India not to 
send their children to the United States in the present 
circumstances,” Reddy said.

Eric K. Jackson, the FBI special agent in charge in Kansas City, 
said that authorities will work to determine if the attack was 
“bias motivated,” but said they “need to have time to thoroughly 
go through the investigation.”

Purinton was taken into custody late Thursday in Clinton, Mo., 
about 80 miles away, and by Friday afternoon he had been 
returned to Johnson County, where he was being held in a 
detention center four miles from Austin’s.

Howe said Thursday that Purinton was charged with one count of 
first-degree murder and two counts of attempted first-degree 
murder. Purinton’s bond was set at $2 million, according to 
court documents.

[Alabama police officer arrested after Indian grandfather left 
partially paralyzed]

It was not immediately clear if Purinton had an attorney. He is 
scheduled to appear in court for his arraignment on Monday 
afternoon.

Court records show that Purinton had faced criminal charges in 
the past for vehicular episodes, one in 2008 for speeding and 
another pair of counts in 1999 alleging that he was driving 
under the influence and made an unsafe turn. The Kansas City 
Star described Purinton as a Navy veteran, former pilot and air 
traffic controller who lives in “a comfortable suburban home.”

Bridget Patton, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Kansas, said Friday 
that the bureau was continuing to work with local police to 
investigate and “determine if there were any civil rights 
violations.”

In a statement Friday, Garmin said the company, which has an 
office in Olathe, was grieving over the incident and working to 
support the families of its employees.

“We’re devastated by the senseless tragedy that took the life of 
one of our associates and friends, Srinivas Kuchibhotla, and 
injured another, Alok Madasani,” the statement said.

The company also sent their thoughts to Grillot, “deemed the 
‘Good Samaritan’ for his heroic efforts that fatal evening.”

In a public video released by the University of Kansas Health 
System, Grillot spoke from his hospital bed about what unfolded. 
When he heard shots being fired, he crouched under a table. 
Hearing nine shots, Grillot expected the man’s magazine to be 
empty, but soon realized he must have miscounted.

“I got behind him, and he turned around and fired at me,” 
Grillot said. The bullets went through his right hand and chest, 
fracturing a vertebrae and his neck, and barely missing his 
carotid artery.

“I’m grateful to be alive,” he said. “Another half inch and I 
could be dead or never walk again.”

He spent the night in the hospital praying that the two other 
men had survived the shooting, he said. When he saw Madasani 
enter his hospital room Thursday morning, “it put the biggest 
smile on my face,” Grillot said. He soon found out that 
Madasani’s wife is five months pregnant.

“I was just doing what anyone should’ve done for another human 
being,” Grillot said, his eyes filling with tears. “It’s not 
about where he’s from or his ethnicity. We’re all humans. I just 
felt like I did what was naturally right to do.”

The Kansas chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations 
called Thursday for state and federal hate crime charges to be 
brought against Purinton “in order to send a strong message that 
violence targeting religious or ethnic minorities will not be 
tolerated,” CAIR-Kansas Board Chair Moussa Elbayoumy said in a 
statement.

Elbayoumy also noted that the same day as the shooting, two 
Kansas men were sentenced for their roles in an assault on a 
black Somali man in Dodge City, Kan.

According to the Justice Department, Armando Sotelo, 24, was 
sentenced to two years of supervised release in that case, while 
Omar Cantero Martinez, 32, was sentenced to 26 months in prison 
and two years of supervised release for committing perjury 
during the hate-crimes prosecution into that assault.

In the fall, federal prosecutors charged three Kansas men with 
plotting to attack an apartment complex, mosque and many Muslim 
immigrants from Somalia.

A picture has begun to emerge of the men who were shot on 
Wednesday. According to Kuchibhotla’s LinkedIn account, he held 
a master’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from 
the University of Texas at El Paso and earned his bachelor’s 
degree at the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University in 
India. Madasani’s LinkedIn profile said he studied at the 
University of Missouri at Kansas City and at Vasavi College of 
Engineering in India.

Kavipriya Muthuramalingam, a good friend of Kuchibhotla’s, said 
in an interview with The Post that the two were part of a 
tightknit group of friends who all used to work at the aerospace 
company Rockwell Collins in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She said 
Kuchibhotla was a kind, levelheaded and technically skilled 
friend who was always smiling. She called him “one of the best 
people you’ve ever met in your life” and “the perfect example of 
a decent gentleman.”

Muthuramalingam, who now lives in Irvine, Calif., said she and 
her fellow Indian friends had not yet begun to discuss any 
potentially racially biased motives of the shooting. She said 
“it affects us all on different levels,” but for now, they were 
all “just focusing on the fact that such a good person was lost.”

She started a GoFundMe account to help relieve medical and 
funeral expenses for Kuchibhotla’s wife, Sunayana, and their 
family. By Friday afternoon, the page had raised over $385,000.

Bohnen, the regular at Austin’s who was there that night and who 
has worked there in the past, said Kuchibhotla and Madasani 
would come in all the time. Though they kept to themselves, they 
were always friendly and willing to share a cigarette or take 
shots of gin with Bohnen.

Austin’s staff gathered at an employee’s house Wednesday night 
to help each other grapple with the night’s events, and on 
Thursday, employees went into the bar to help clean up. Owner 
Brandon Blum wrote on the bar’s Web page that he hoped to reopen 
Austin’s by Saturday. Outside the bar, flowers were left at a 
makeshift memorial, the Kansas City Star reported.

“We are so sorry that this happened on our premises,” Blum 
wrote. “We have never experienced any sort of tragedy like this 
in our 30 years.”

>From his hospital bed, Grillot said he had been planning on 
going fishing this weekend before the shooting occurred. So 
after recovering, that was the first thing he looked forward to 
doing. He also said he hoped to get together with Madasani, “the 
gentleman I’ve now become best friends with,” and meet his son 
once he is born.

“After last night, we’re definitely going to be spending a 
little bit of time together,” he said. “Don’t think it’s going 
to be at the bar, though. Maybe some grilling in the backyard 
with a beer or two.”

Annie Gowen and Rama Lakshmi in New Delhi contributed to this 
report, which has been updated since it was first published.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-
mix/wp/2017/02/24/get-out-of-my-country-kansan-reportedly-yelled-
before-shooting-2-men-from-india-killing-
one/?utm_term=.7488350d6f34
  

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He yelled 'Get out of my country, ' witnesses say, and then shot 2 thieves of American jobs from India, killing one "Caused By Outsourcing" <outsourcing@crimes-against-america.nytimes.com> - 2017-03-28 07:06 +0200

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