DA Drops Charges Against Man in Monte Sereno Murder Case

—By Bay City News Service

The Santa Clara County District Attorney's Office has dropped charges against one of five defendants in the November slaying of a Monte Sereno man in what a defense lawyer said resulted from mistaken DNA evidence.

The county's Laboratory of Criminalistics was wrong to conclude that DNA from defendant Lukis Anderson matched a sample taken from Raveesh Kumra's fingernails after Kumra was found murdered in his Monte Sereno home, public defender Kelley Kulick said.

"I don't think we have an answer to what went wrong," Kulick said. "I think that's what we're hoping gets looked into."

The district attorney's office Thursday agreed to dismiss murder, robbery and assault with a deadly weapon charges against Anderson, who is now out of jail, after confirming he was not at Kumra's home the night of the murder.
          
Deputy District Attorney Kevin Smith said Monday that Anderson's release would not jeopardize his case that relies on DNA evidence against two other men suspected of taking part in the murder.

"This will have no effect on the other defendants," Smith said.

Kumra was found dead with his hands bound on Nov. 30 inside his residence on Withey Road after police received a 1:30 a.m. call from his wife that men had ransacked and burglarized their home.

His wife, Harinder Kumra, was tied and beaten but survived.

Anderson, 26, a transient, was charged with Javier Garcia, 21, of Oakland, Deangelo Austin, 21, of Sacramento, Raven Dixon, 22, of Alameda, and
Katrina Fritz, 32, of Pittsburg.

Prosecutors claimed that Anderson, Garcia and Austin forced their way into Kumra's home and bound, blindfolded and gagged him with duct tape, which led to his death, and that Dixon and Fritz acted as accessories.

Their case remains that Austin's DNA was on tape used to tie Kumra up and Garcia's was found on rubber gloves in the victim's home.

The evidence against Anderson involved a sample of "mixed profile" DNA taken from Kumra's fingernails that the crime lab, working for the district attorney's office, claimed was Anderson's, Kulick said.

The problem was that at about 10 p.m. on the evening Kumra died, Anderson had been found on 10th Street in downtown San Jose in a highly intoxicated state from drinking alcohol, Kulick said.

Based on evidence Kulick gathered, San Jose Fire Department paramedics transported Anderson to Santa Clara County Valley Medical Center, where his blood alcohol concentration was 0.41 percent, an extremely high level.

He remained hospitalized there for the next 12 hours, Kulick said.

Anderson suffers from severe mental illness and the effects of head trauma when a truck hit him while he walked on a street about two years ago, Kulick said.

Kulick said she will be trying to find out how the crime lab concluded Anderson's DNA matched DNA inside Kumra's fingernails.

"There are a number of ways things can go wrong with DNA," she said. "I think we are hoping to get to the bottom of what went wrong."

The DNA evidence is very powerful in criminal cases, but sometimes when labs try to find a match or "hit" using DNA samples from a number of people, mistakes can be made, Kulick said.

Had Anderson's whereabouts that night not been established by witnesses, with DNA in evidence weighing against him "Mr. Anderson would have been doing life in prison or on death row," she said.

The attorney presented Anderson's alibi the night of Kumra's murder about two weeks ago in a closed-door meeting with the district attorney's office and a Los Gatos police detective who investigated the murder, Kulick said.

Among those at the meeting were Smith, Supervising Deputy District Attorney Lance Daugherty, Assistant District Attorney Scott Tsui, district attorney's Investigator Peter Ramirez and Los Gatos police Detective Erin Lunsford.

Kulick said she still has not received the DNA evidence and other discovery about her client from the district attorney's office and may by the end of the month.
          
But she praised the district attorney's office in dropping the charges after listening to her presentation and confirming Anderson's alibi.

"They easily could have dragged their feet, but they didn't," she said.

There is no evidence of malfeasance involving criminologists in the lab where the mistaken match was made, Kulick said.

However, the lab used the same system to feed DNA samples used by prosecutors to link Garcia and Austin to the murder scene, she said.

"I think they are coming to grips with what happened," she said.

Smith said that prosecutors had considered Anderson an "outlier" in the case to begin with and that DNA is being used with other strong evidence against Garcia and Austin.

Garcia's cellphone has been tied to the murder scene and Harinder Kumra identified Austin from a photograph, Smith said.

"I don't believe the crime lab has made any mistakes," Smith said. "I have the utmost confidence in the criminologists and their supervisors who have worked this case. Not only one person signs off on it."

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