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A 30-year-old California man was sentenced to death March 17 for the May 21, 2007 murders of his ex-girlfriend’s father and sister and the attempted murder of her mother. Orange County Superior Court Judge Thomas Goethals handed down the death penalty sentence against Iftekhar Murtaza, the Orange County Register reported.
Murtaza was convicted of murdering 56-year-old Jayprakash Dhanak and his 20-year-old daughter Karishma Dhanak, the father and sister of his ex-girlfriend, Shayona Dhanak, and of nearly killing her mother, Leela Dhanak. He apparently believed the family led to their breakup because they were devout Hindus and Murtaza is a Muslim.
During the 2007 attack, the three family members were abducted from their Anaheim Hills home, brutally beaten and stabbed. The burned bodies of Jayprakash and Karishma Dhanak were found near a bike trail in Irvine. Leela Dhanak was found unconscious on a neighbors’ lawn in Anaheim Hills, her throat slashed and the family’s home burning nearby. She survived her gruesome injuries.
Autopsy reports showed Jayprakash Dhanak suffered 29 stab wounds to his body, and also had his skull fractured, resulting in a fatal brain injury. Karishma Dhanak was alive when her throat was slit and her body set alight, the Daily Mail reported.
Their bodies had been found in a park in Irvine about two miles from the University of California dorm where Shayona Dhanak lived.
During the trial, Leela Dhanak described her husband, Jayprakash, as her “soul mate and companion,” and her daughter Karishma Dhanak as her companion and friend. “It seems incomprehensible that I survived this ordeal to wake up from my coma and find half my family gone,” Leela Dhanak said. “Yet through an act of providence I remained. Now my surviving daughter, Shayona, and I have only each other for mutual comfort.”
Murtaza was arrested in Arizona, four days after the murders attempting to board a plane to his native Bangladesh with a one-way ticket and $11,000 in cash, KTLA TV reported. The investigation later led to the arrests of two accused accomplices. Co-defendant, 30-year-old Charles Anthony Murphy Jr. of Mission Hills, California, was found guilty in 2012 in connection with the case. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. A second co-defendant, 29-year-old Vitaliy Krasnoperov of Hollywood, California, was currently awaiting a new trial date in the third re-trial of his case, the KTLA TV report said.
After a jury in 2013 determined that Murtaza should receive the death penalty, he hired new legal counsel, requiring more than a year in delays for the sentencing as attorneys prepared their arguments, the Orange County Register reported. Murtaza was expected to be transferred to San Quentin within the next 10 days.
According to the Daily Mail report, Murtaza married 20-year-old suspected murderer Marissa Star Bilotti in a jailhouse ceremony in June 2011, after exchanging letters for five months. Bilotti is charged with first-degree murder, burglary, and robbery. She faces 32 years to life in prison for helping a friend, Derek Christopher Adams, murder a man in 2010.
In California, there are 748 people on death row, the most of any state. However, no executions have been carried out since the state put a moratorium on the death penalty in 2006. Four years later, the state sought to execute a man who raped and murdered a 15-year-old girl, but it was blocked by state and federal courts over concerns about lethal injections, a July 16, 2014 CNN report said.
