A man who hurled racial slurs and shot two Indian men, killing one, at a Kansas bar last year received three additional life sentences on Tuesday.
Adam Purinton, 53, had already received a life sentence for the first-degree murder of Srinivas Kuchibhotla, a 32-year-old engineer from India, in the February 2017 shooting.
In May, Purinton pleaded guilty to two federal hate crime charges and a firearm charge to avoid the death penalty. He received a life sentence for each of those crimes on Tuesday.
Authorities say that Purinton verbally harassed Kuchibhotla and his Indian co-worker, Alok Madasani, yelling “Get out of my country” at them before opening fire in Austins Bar and Grill in Olathe, Kansas. Purinton injured another man, Ian Grillot, who tried to intervene. Grillot and Madasani were injured but survived.
Purinton said he “targeted and shot Kuchibhotla and Madasani because of their race, color and national origin” at his federal guilty-plea hearing, according to a Justice Department statement.
Sunaya Dumala, Kuchibhotla’s widow, said in a statement Tuesday that she hopes Purinton educates himself about immigrants.
“Not giving you a death penalty was our choice because we believed the
punishment for this hateful act should not be a life for life,” Dumala said.
“What I do request is you use the time that is being given to you to educate yourself and inform others who are still out in the open and stop them from killing innocent people as you did — choosing violence over kindness.”
America does not do a good job of tracking incidents of hate and bias. We need your help to create a database of such incidents across the country, so we all know what’s going on. Tell us your story.