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

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
*

On Saturday, March 25, 2017 at 3:55:04 PM UTC+8, Caused By Outsourcing wrote:
This man is a hero and should go free.

month-old news
are all racists so slooooooooooooooooooow?

On 3/25/2017 2:46 AM, wrote:
On Saturday, March 25, 2017 at 3:55:04 PM UTC+8, Caused By Outsourcing wrote:
This man is a hero and should go free.

month-old news
are all racists so slooooooooooooooooooow?


The OP is probably a "right-to-life" nut too.