Police: Texas Trucker Chases and Kills Woman and Husband at Home in Seattle Area

SEATTLE, Washington (AP) — A Texas truck driver who became obsessed with a software engineer in Washington state after meeting her via a social media chat app killed her, her husband and himself after stalking them for months, police say.

Zohre Sadegi, 33, and her husband Mohammad Milad Naseri, 35, were gunned down in their home in a Seattle suburb by Ramin Khodakaramrezai, 38, according to Redmond Police Chief Darrell Lowe. He said the officers spent a week trying to give Khodakaramrezai a protection order, but were unable to find him prior to the assassination.

“This is the absolute worst outcome for a stalking case,” Lowe said at a media briefing on Friday afternoon. “This is the worst nightmare of every victim, every detective, every police chief.”

A written statement from the police department on Friday said the suspect began communicating with Sadeghi after listening to her podcasts. Lowe explained that they met because he heard her on an audio chat on the Clubhouse app, where he said she set up a discussion for Farsi-speakers looking for jobs in the tech industry.

Sadeghi’s mother called police around 1:45 a.m. Friday after she ran away from home and ran to a neighbor’s house.

According to Lowe, officers who arrived saw Naceri collapse at the door of the house and dragged him outside, finding that he had been shot. They performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation, but he died at the scene. Inside the house, officers found Sadeghi and the suspect dead.

Hodakaramrezai made friends with Sadeghi in an online chat at the end of 2021. Lowe said they met in person last summer before the contact escalated into harassing phone calls and threats in the fall. According to Lowe, at some point, he unexpectedly showed up at their house with flowers.

As the stalker’s behavior escalated, Redmond police filed a complaint against him for harassment and telephone harassment on March 2, and Sadeghi and Naseri received a protection order the next day.

Sadeghi wrote in her application for a protection order that Hodakaramrezai threatened to come to her house and set it on fire, and left voice messages saying he would not stop unless “he killed himself or died,” according to The Seattle Times. .

Sadeghi tried to cut off contact with Khodakaramrezai, but the harassment continued, so she went to the police in December and again in January after his activities intensified.

Lowe said at one point the suspect contacted Sadeghi more than 100 times in a single day. He emphasized that a restraining order is just a piece of paper – it allows the police to take action if someone violates it, but cannot protect a person when “someone intends to harm them.”

Sadeghi was a software engineer at Promontory MortgagePath, which provided mortgage services, before it closed in November. According to her LinkedIn profile, she was also a graduate student at the University of Washington.

Sadeghi’s Twitter feed included content related to progressive politics and human rights, especially women’s rights in Iran. She and Nassiri have also described themselves as science fiction fans.

Nassiri has been with Amazon since January 2022 and he said on his blog that while growing up in Iran, he was voted the second best singer in Tehran in 2007 before he went to study at Sharif University of Technology. The couple married in 2011 after moving to the US.

A number of Nassiri’s blog posts detail his attempts to land a job at Google, which he eventually succeeded in 2017. He worked there for five years before moving to Amazon.

While most of Nasiri’s posts have been about work or technology, last October he wrote to denounce the death of a 16-year-old girl amid protests in Iran over the treatment of women following the death of a 22-year-old woman who was detained by the country’s vice police.