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Victim's co-worker second-guesses fateful drive "I still get all tensed up. Just coming into the office every day is depressing. There are so many reminders." Thursday, May 04, 2000 By Robert Dvorchak, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Joe Lanuka keeps wondering. If he hadn't gone to the bank, he wouldn't have dropped off his co-worker at a grocery store. And then Lanuka wouldn't have found him shot or seen him dead in a hospital.
For complete Post-Gazette coverage, click here.
"I feel responsible for him. If I could have gone an hour earlier or a half-hour later, it could have all been avoided. People wouldn't be suffering now," said Lanuka, 57, of Dormont.
"It was bad timing. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time."
On Friday afternoon, Lanuka announced that he was going to withdraw some cash for the weekend at Dollar Bank in Scott. Anil Thakur, who worked as a senior electrical engineer at WideCom Group Inc. in South Fayette, asked to tag along so he could pick up some provisions at India Grocers.
Like other natives of India who worked for six-month stretches at WideCom, Thakur didn't have a car. Lanuka had provided rides to co-workers maybe twice a month for the past 2 1/2 years. During the drive, Thakur talked about getting plane tickets for his return home to Bihar, India, where his wife, two small children and his retired parents were waiting for him.
But on Friday, during the 10-minute span it took for Lanuka to drop off Thakur and go to the bank, a gunman with a .357-caliber Magnum shot Thakur multiple times and shot the India Grocers manager, Sandip Patel. Thakur, 31, died hours later at Allegheny General Hospital. Patel was taken to Mercy Hospital, where he is receiving treatment in the intensive care unit.
When he returned to the grocery store, Lanuka couldn't believe what he saw beside Thakur's plastic bag filled with a sack of flour, dried beans and other items.
"I wondered why he wasn't coming out. So I went in and Anil was on the ground. I found him lying there behind one of the counters," Lanuka said yesterday. "My heart fell to my stomach. I said, 'Oh, my God, what could have happened here?' I thought it was the safest place you could ever go."
Lanuka called the office from a pay phone to tell them Thakur had been shot. He broke the news to Thakur's roommate, Dinish Kumar, also a native of India. Then Lanuka and Kumar drove to the hospital to identify Thakur's body because he wasn't carrying any identification.
"I still get all tensed up. Just coming into the office every day is depressing. There are so many reminders," said Lanuka, a technical support manager.
The South Fayette distribution center is the U.S. headquarters of WideCom. It receives scanners and printers made at a factory in India, then does support work and quality control. That's why so many Indians come here in six-month stretches. The company even provides an apartment for them.
On Tuesday night, Thakur's body was flown back to India, where his family has been fasting until it arrives. WideCom made the flight arrangements.
Yesterday, co-workers were packing his personal belongings into three suitcases. Thakur had bought an extra one to haul back stuff he had bought here, including a little doll and toys for his son and daughter, ages 2 and 4.
Kumar will take those suitcases back with him when he leaves Monday for India. He and Thakur, his best friend, would have been traveling home together.
"It's very sad, quite a shock," Kumar said. "The family has no income now. His father is retired and his mother is a housewife."
When asked if he would ever return to Pittsburgh or America, Kumar answered softly: "No. This hurt me."
Dick Pollera, WideCom's vice president of sales and marketing, said Thakur was a diligent worker who did everything he was asked.
He said the company's Indian employees looked forward to their treks to India Grocers, where they could buy rice and spices and rent Indian movies, because it made them feel less homesick.
"It's been tough," Pollera said. "I'm a Pittsburgh guy, and things like this just don't happen. It's a terrible tragedy."
Pollera had one final thought for Richard Baumhammers, the 34-year-old attorney from Mt. Lebanon, a man with a history of psychiatric problems who has been charged in the five slayings, the second rampage in as many months attributed to ethnic hatred in Pittsburgh suburbs.
"He has to be a sick person to do what he did to all those people," Pollera said.
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