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The following podcast contains dramatizations of actual events. Certain situations, dialogue, names, and locations may have been changed. Some scenes are graphic in nature. Listener discretion is advised. Up next. Are you awake? Yeah. Why are we going out? A local police officer gets a surprise emergency call. We did home invasion that turned into 177. Holy s***. We're right now. DNA leads straight to potential suspects.
It was right after we got the DNA hit that it kind of all started coming together. But could DNA, the so-called gold standard of modern forensics be mistaken? I think we need to acknowledge that there are limitations to our technology. For a while, it seems the impossible is possible. But in the end, the science is clear. No one can be in two places at the same time. It really was a shock to the system of everybody.
The Mati Sereno, California is both home base and a getaway destination for many high income tech executives from nearby Silicon Valley. It's an elite community, very wealthy homes, gated community where you don't enter into a driveway unless you have permitted access. It's a pretty tight-knit group, neighbors, no neighbors. The town's name translates as Serene Mountain. But on a November night in 2012, it was anything but Serene. Around 130 a.m., a terrified woman called 911.
We have been sent somebody here. Somebody's there. One was when it's dead, one was when somebody killed him. Quickly, please. It's great, you know. He don't know. They tied me and they tied him and everything. Within minutes, police and paramedics arrived at a 7,000 square foot home in the shadow of the Santa Cruz mountain. Stay here, stay there, don't move. Two victims were inside. 66-year-old Ravi Schumra, also known as Ravi, was dead at the scene.
He was tied up, had tape around his eyes and his mouth and his hands tied behind his back. There was no blood, there was no bullet wounds or stab wounds. I was thinking, robbery gone bad. Ronnie Schumra, Ravi's ex-wife with whom he still lived, was found terrified and blindfolded. Mrs. Okay, it's us. We're the last guys to shoot. She told police that earlier that night, she'd gone to an upstairs bedroom and had left Ravi watching TV in the living room.
Later that night, a man burst into her bedroom. That person forcibly escorted her out of the bedroom and into the kitchen family room area, where she briefly saw Ravi was struggling with a couple of other intruders. She was pleading for them to leave him alone because he had health conditions. Ronnie said the attackers stole the jewelry she had on and appeared to be searching the house for other valuables.
Robbie Kumra's autopsy lent way to the theory that the attackers didn't intend to kill him. The corner included that he had suffocated to death. The duct tape had been wrapped all the way around his face multiple times. And so the duct tape just prevented him from being able to breathe enough to stay alive. Almost everyone on the case was familiar with the victim. Robbie Kumra was a classic immigrant success story. Ravi's Kumra emigrated from India in 1970.
And he started working in Silicon Valley and helped found some cellular companies. And then he became an angel investor funding new companies in Silicon Valley. He also had an odd habit that might have ultimately led to his death. He locked the doors. He was very, very bad about keeping the house locked. He felt that it was a gated estate. They were in a safe community. He didn't feel the need to keep the house locked.
Investigators surmised that if they could find out who knew Robbie Kumra kept his house unlocked, they'd have a straight line to who killed him. Angie has made it easier than ever to hire high quality pros to get all your home service jobs done well. Whether it's routine maintenance and emergency repair or a dream project, Angie lets you compare quotes from multiple local pros, browse homeowner reviews, and even book a service instantly.
Angie's been connecting people with skilled pros for nearly 30 years. So the next time you have a home project, bring it to Angie to get your job done well. Download the free Angie mobile app today or visit Angie.com. That's ANGI.com. If you're an athlete, you know the greatest motivator of all is the fear of letting your teammates down. After all, the team is only as good as its weakest link. So you owe it to those wearing the same jersey as you to be your best every time you step on the field.
That's why there's no vape in team. When you vape, you can expose your lungs to toxic chemicals that can damage your lungs. If you're a step behind, the teams a step behind. Brought to you by the real cost and the FDA. Investigators on the Robbie Kumra murder case ultimately determined that some $30,000 in cash and jewelry had been stolen from his home. Since Robbie apparently thought no one would ever target his house in upscale Monticell reno, he never invested in surveillance cameras.
The only witness to the crime was Ronnie Kumra. And before she was blindfolded, she got a pretty good look at one of the attackers. He was holding a cell phone that was lit up like the screen was lit up. And so that had lit his face up a bit and she could see him enough to describe him. Ronnie helped a forensic artist create this sketch which was soon released to local media. Another possible break came from the materials this home invasion team left in the house.
They had apparently had an idea as to how to destroy evidence but it wasn't terribly effective as it turned out. So there was a significant number of gloves in the sink. This sink had been filled up with water and soap had been added. So they were sitting in sudsy water in the sink. In addition to the gloves was the distinctive looking duct tape that had been used to bind the victims. As this evidence was processed by the lab, detectives got some interesting information about their victim.
Robbie Kumra's marital situation was unusual. Before their very recent and very amicable divorce, he'd been married to Ronnie for more than 35 years. They had two adult children but Robbie had other children with other women. The more I dug into the victim's background, I quickly learned that there was a lot of prostitutes in it. There were several women that he had met that he had started families with, her just homes and cars and he supplied them with money.
He wanted to impregnate these women. He wanted to have children. From what we gather from talking to people that knew him, he was fairly impressed with himself and thought that his genes should carry on. And so he would make arrangements with these women. Of the women Robbie consorted with, there was one he seemed particularly fond of. One of them was a woman named Katrina Fritz who he had met in 1999 at the time she was 19. And then continued to have a relationship with for the next 12 years.
Over that period he had given her hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts, cars and helped sustain her lifestyle for that period. Police thought Katrina would have known the house would not be locked. She likely knew where the valuables would be located but she denied any involvement in the crime. Meanwhile the attackers had made a big mistake. Soaking the gloves and soapy water did not destroy the DNA. It was also found on the duct tape left at the crime scene.
Within days the state DNA database identified the alleged perpetrators as DeAngelo Austin and Javier Garcia. They were members of a gang known as Ghost Town. And then there were also members of an offshoot of Ghost Town called the Money Team. And the Money Team had a primary function of doing home invasions on wealthy people, primarily wealthy Asian or Indian people. Javier Garcia bore a marked resemblance to the composite sketch.
In addition the DNA database turned up a hit to a third alleged perpetrator. That DNA under the fingernails belonged to Lucas Anderson. And Lucas Anderson's DNA was in the database because years earlier he had been convicted of a home invasion robbery. The case looked open and shot. The suspects had been convicted of crimes like this in the past and their DNA put them at the scene of the murder. And that's a thing. The DNA is not wrong. The DNA is the DNA.
But soon detectives and forensic analysts got some information that seemed to defy the basic principles of forensic science. Lucas Anderson had an airtight alibi. The evidence against the suspects in the murder of Ravi Kumra was stacking up fast. DNA put three men at the scene. And cell phone evidence further cemented the case against two of the alleged attackers, D'Angelo Austin and Javier Garcia.
The cell phone records showed both their cell phones in Modestorino during the time frame of the crime using their cell phone. Either sending or receiving text messages, things like that. A further background check revealed a stunning bit of information. It stemmed from a recent traffic violation by the suspect, D'Angelo Austin. The name on the car that he had gotten a camera ticket with, a red light camera ticket. It was registered to his sister, Katrina Fritz.
Katrina Fritz was a sex worker that Ravi Kumra had had a relationship with for 12 years. Investigators felt that Katrina would have known Ravi Kumra always kept his house open and allegedly told her brother. All the suspects, Katrina Fritz, D'Angelo Austin, Javier Garcia and Lucas Anderson were taken into custody and faced charges of capital murder. The evidence made sense, except for one thing.
The third man, 26-year-old Lucas Anderson, a homeless man with apparent mental health issues, had no known link to the other suspects. All of us had the idea that, well, if your DNA is there, you must have been there. And so I think even Lucas, who was very staunch from the beginning that I did not do this, I wasn't there, even started to question himself. For Lucas Anderson, his arrest in the Ravi Kumra murder was just the latest in a series of calamities.
Lucas kind of had the deck stacked against him from birth. He was raised by a single mom who was unhoused. He developed a substance abuse issue with alcohol. And he had some head injuries at one point. He was drunk and he stepped off a curb and got hit by a truck. And ever since then, his memory wasn't so great. But DNA not only put Lucas at the scene, it was under the victim's fingernails, which meant some very close contact. Investigators confronted Lucas with this evidence.
This is why you're here. Your DNA is found in our crime scene on our victim. Starting to raise the bells. I don't know what you guys tell me. I don't. I don't have a crystal ball to know what the truth is, how many you do. And in all the years I've been doing this, I've never seen all the years I've lived in harm. Lucas, who was all too aware of his memory issues, actually began to doubt his own story.
DNA evidence carries so much weight that he says, oh my god, maybe I did do it. I black out sometimes. I get so drunk. I mean, it doesn't seem like something that I would do. I don't remember it, but my memory is not very good. If Lucas colluded with the other suspects, there had to be a connection between them. But try as they might. Detectives couldn't find one.
Lucas is a pretty sophisticated gang home invasion. Lucas is not the kind of guy you want to take with you to go do some kind of sophisticated crime. His public defender, now a superior court judge, said about tracking his whereabouts on the day and night of the cumra murder. Not exactly easy when dealing with a homeless alcoholic. Luckily, Lucas didn't normally stray from a 12-block area in San Jose, about 10 miles from the murder site.
And he had friends there. They looked after him. They showed me where he would sleep, where he would panhandle. They knew him backwards and forwards. They were very close friends to him. And what these people showed Lucas' legal team upended the case against him, despite the DNA match. My first reaction in my head, of course, was holy crap. How did I miss that?
Lucas Anderson and three other suspects in the murder of Ravi Kumra were staring down possible life sentences or worse, the death penalty. But Lucas' public defender soon discovered that he'd interacted with police at a local supermarket on the night of the cumra murder.
Lucas is pretty highly intoxicated and he's panhandling. Lucas enters the store and passes out or basically falls down. And the clerk doesn't think that he's able to care for himself and makes a call for San Jose police to respond. Lucas was five times the legal limit. He was so drunk he was taken straight to a local hospital. Records showed he was admitted at 10.45pm.
In what turned out to be a crucial development, Lucas wasn't released until nine o'clock the next morning, which covered the entire period of when the homicide could have occurred. They held him overnight, which was the night of the homicide. And they had him on 10 minute bed checks the entire night. But Lucas's DNA under Ravi Kumra's fingernails said otherwise. It said Lucas wasn't in the hospital. It said he was in very close contact with the victim on the night he was killed.
I felt pretty strongly about DNA evidence on the victim's fingernails being solid. In my mind, it was still a possibility that there was something wrong with the hospital records that maybe they had the wrong guy. Maybe somebody thought that was Lucas and it wasn't Lucas. But Lucas was identified definitively by numerous hospital workers as the man in the hospital the night of the murder.
Now detectives went back to the forensics lab. The first thought that everyone had was that it had to be lab contamination, right? Because that's something that happens at DNA from one case somehow migrates to the evidence of another case. But they didn't find any evidence of contamination. Lucas Anderson appeared to be in two places at the same time. Police Corporal Aaron Lunsford was determined to figure out how this happened.
I never wanted to say anybody that was innocent to jail. And this is somebody that I might be saying to jail for life. Lunsford worried he'd never get to the bottom of this very strange case. But then he came upon a routine set of hospital admission reports submitted from the night of the cum remurder. And I'm looking at the names of the paramedics. And one of them was, it's not a common name. And I looked at it and I go, that looks really familiar. And I thought it can't be.
One probable answer to the mystery was shockingly simple. The paramedics from both the cum remurder and Lucas' hospitalization were the same men. A few hours after they got Lucas to the hospital, they responded to the cum remurder. Could this connection explain how Lucas Anderson's DNA was found under Robbie Kummer's fingernails? Cynthia Kale conducted the first study in the US on the phenomenon of secondary DNA transfer.
With direct transfer, there's either you directly touch the object and your DNA is left behind or you cough, sneeze, you're speaking and you spit. You know, there's nothing in between you and that surface. With secondary transfer, there's kind of a vector that is in between. So it can be another person, it can be an object. In modern DNA technology, minuscule amounts of what's called touch DNA can be lifted or transferred from almost any surface.
The studies have shown that that initial brief contact is when that transfer is going to occur and it's not necessarily how long that contact is going to increase transfer. If it's going to happen, it's going to happen in that initial touch. And this analysis provided a plausible reason for how Lucas Anderson appeared to be in two places at the same time.
When Lucas was taken to the hospital, paramedics placed on his finger what's known as a pulse oximeter, a simple plastic device used to check a victim's heart rate and blood oxygen level. Just a few hours later, that same team of paramedics appears to have used the same pulse oximeter on Ravi Kumra, possibly creating the secondary transfer that put Lucas Anderson's DNA under Ravi's fingernails.
Those pathometers, they have a non-poor surface, so they're going to, you know, that DNA is just going to sit on there. This information, Lucas Anderson, a man who had been given few breaks in his life, was free. All thanks to some dog at work from his legal team and local police. He was very well aware that he really dodged a bullet with regards to everything being done up front. And so he was always grateful and appreciative, he's always full of thank yous.
The law now turned to the people still charged in Ravi Kumra's murder. Katrina Fritz, Ravi's subsidized mistress of a dozen years, admitted making it known that Ravi kept a lot of valuables in his unlocked house and even gave her brother a map of the inside layout. She struck a plea deal and spent only four years in prison. Javier Garcia got 37 years to life.
DiAngelo Austin was given life without parole. A third man, Marcella Strummer, was linked to the crime through DNA later found at the scene. He also got life without parole. Investigators say there's a moral to this story, a moral that saved Lucas Anderson and perhaps many others from being unjustly convicted. If it's only DNA, then I would be wary of using that as your only evidence when we go into court as a DNA analyst and as an expert.
What we say, the jury is going to believe. So had he not had that alibi, I think he would be in jail right now or a sitting on death row. The presumption of innocence means something. It needs to mean something and there's a reason why we start there and that includes with science that science doesn't change the burden.
It doesn't change how cases need to be proved. Evidence, just like any other evidence. If it wasn't a screw up, it was us not understanding the science and the limitations I should say of the science.