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Podcaster, Husband Killed By Alleged Stalker Who Sent Her 'Vulgar, Angry' Messages In Months-Long Nightmare
Ramin Khodakaramrezaei, 38, had stalked Zohreh Sadeghi, 33, and her 35-year-old husband Mohammed Naseri for "many months," before killing them in an apparent murder-suicide, authorities say.
An apparent stalker broke into the suburban Seattle home of a female tech podcaster, killing her and her husband before taking his own life following what court documents describe as a months-long campaign of unwanted contact and disturbing behavior.
Zohreh Sadeghi, 33, filed for a no-contact restraining order against Ramin Khodakaramrezaei, a 38-year-old long haul truck driver from Texas, on March 3, according to KOMO News. She and her husband, 35-year-old Mohammed Naseri, were found shot dead in their Redmond, Washington home on Friday around 1:45 a.m.
Sadeghi's mother, who was visiting her daughter and was in the home when Khodakaramrezaei broke in through a window, was able to escape to a neighbor's house and call 911, according to local news station KING 5.
Sadeghi and Khodakaramrezaei were both dead in the master bedroom of the home when Redmond Police arrived. They administered CPR to Naseri, who was found with a gunshot wound to the chest and was pronounced dead shortly afterward.
Sadeghi hosted a podcast geared toward helping Farsi speakers find tech jobs. Khodakaramrezaei was a listener and began contacting her last year.
Leading up to the murder-suicide, according to the restraining order petition obtained by KOMO News, Khodakaramrezaei left hundreds of "vulgar, angry and threatening" voicemails and messages for the Sadeghi and her husband, sometimes contacting them more than 20 times per day. At one point, Sadeghi wrote, Khodakaramrezaei called her more than 100 times in one day.
Khodakaramrezaei said in one of the voicemails that the "only thing that [would] make all this stop is if he killed himself or died," the order of protection states. In one voicemail, Sadeghi said the man threatened to "show up to my door and burn himself and set fire on my house by burning the tree that I love.”
"Khodakaramrezaei has bursts of anger and is completely delusional," Sadeghi wrote in the haunting petition. "These delusions make me fear for my life and the lives of my loved ones.”
The 33-year-old woman had recently undergone back surgery, she wrote, limiting her mobility and impacting her ability to "respond to a crisis," she wrote in her petition.
“All of this has caused me great distress and pain, and now I am suffering from a deep-seated fear for my safety. It has taken a toll on my recovery,” Sadeghi wrote. “I haven’t been able to open the curtains in my bedroom out of fear of him being outside watching me."
But although the order of protection was approved, police said they were unable to serve it to Khodakaramrezaei before Friday's tragedy because he worked as a trucker and was therefore "difficult to pin down to one location", according to Redmond Police Chief Darrell Lowe.
Lowe told reporters that the murder-suicide was the "absolute worst outcome for a stalking case," according to NBC News.
"This is every victim's, every detective's, every police chief’s worst nightmare," he said.
On Nov. 6 of last year, Sadeghi asked the man to stop contacting her after the frequency of his messaging increased drastically. But through November and December of that year, Khodakaramrezaei continued to call her from various numbers, including from phones at hotels close to her home. Even blocking all private numbers didn't stop the onslaught of calls, according to the order of protection.
The tech podcaster first contacted police on Dec. 20, after Khodakaramrezaei showed up with flowers on her front doorstep after waiting for her husband to leave the house. That month, he reportedly called Sadeghi more than 50 times.
Sadeghi noted that she had never shared any contact information with Khodakaramrezaei, who she said also began finding her friend's numbers and addresses and contacting them.
Police gave Khodakaramrezaei a warning, urging him to put a stop to his stalking behavior, on Jan. 16, KOMO reported.
But Khodakaramrezaei carried on, sending Sadeghi unwanted gifts on at least two occasions, documents show. At one point he hired, then quickly cancelled, a jazz band to play outside her home for two hours. On Feb. 20, he sent the woman a neck scarf, which was confiscated by police as evidence, according to the New York Post.
Sadeghi had been completing a graduate degree at University of Washington and worked as a software engineer at Promontory MortgagePath before the company closed in November, according to her LinkedIn profile. Her former remote coworker, Lora Ruffin, told ABC 7 that the now-deceased woman "got along with everyone on the team."
Naseri had worked at Amazon since January of last year, according to the outlet, and previously worked at Google.
