Two notorious San Fernando Valley men sentenced to death in federal court in 2007 for a kidnap-for-ransom plot and cold-blooded murder of five people have had their sentences commuted to life in prison by President Biden.
Soviet immigrants Iuri Mikel and Julijus Kadamovas ran an aquarium store on Ventura Boulevard, where they hatched their gruesome plan, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The duo targeted immigrant communities, luring their victims with promises of lucrative business deals, then brutally assaulting them, kidnapping them, demanding ransom from their families, and eventually strangling them to death.
Between 2001 and 2002, Mikel and Kadamovas murdered four men and one woman and dumped their bodies in New Melons Reservoir near Yosemite, five hours north.
They were arrested in February 2002 after their electronic payments were tracked and they collected nearly $1 million in ransom money.
The victims were identified as:
Mayer Muscatel, 58, of Sherman Oaks; Nick Karavadze, 35, of Woodland Hills; Alexander Umansky, 39, of Sherman Oaks; Rita Pekleler, 39, of West Hollywood; George Safiev, 37, of Beverly Hills.
The notorious killers’ sentences were upheld by a federal appeals court in 2018, but President Joe Biden on Dec. 23 commuted the sentences of all but three inmates on federal death row.
“Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal death row inmates to life in prison without the possibility of parole,” the president said in a statement. Other than mass murders motivated by terrorism or hatred. ”
The cuts, which have sparked outrage in some quarters, come weeks before President-elect Donald Trump returns to the White House.
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Biden’s statement went on to condemn the murder, express condolences to the victims and say his heart hurts “for all the families who have suffered an unimaginable and irreparable loss,” before commuting the sentence. clarified the reason for choosing.
“I am more convinced than ever that we must end the death penalty at the federal level,” he said. “In good conscience, I cannot silently allow the new administration to resume the executions I had stopped.”
The remaining three federal death row inmates are:
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who helped carry out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; Dylann Roof, who killed nine black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015; and Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018. Robert Bowers, who massacred 11 believers in
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
