Two notorious San Fernando Valley men sentenced to death in federal court in 2007 for a kidnappings-for-ransom scheme and the cold-blooded murder of five people have had their sentences commuted to life in prison by President Biden.
Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas, Soviet immigrants, operated an aquarium store on Ventura Boulevard where they hatched their gruesome plot, the Los Angeles Times reported.
The duo targeted the immigrant community, luring victims in with the promise of profitable business deals before ruthlessly beating them, kidnapping them, demanding ransoms from their families and, ultimately, strangling them to death.
Between 2001 and 2002, Mikhel and Kadamovas murdered four men and one woman, disposing of their bodies five hours north in the New Melones reservoir near Yosemite.
They collected nearly $1 million in ransoms before an electronic payment was traced back to them and they were arrested in Feb. 2002.
The victims were identified as:
- 58-year-old Sherman Oaks resident Meyer Muscatel
- 29-year-old Woodland Hills resident Nick Kharabadze
- 35-year-old Sherman Oaks resident Alexander Umansky
- 39-year-old West Hollywood resident Rita Pekler
- 37-year-old Beverly Hills resident George Safiev
While the infamous killers’ sentences were upheld in federal appeals court in 2018, 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 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole,” the president said in a statement. “These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.”
The commutations, which have sparked outrage in some circles, come just weeks before President-Elect Donald Trump is set to return to the White House.
Biden’s statement went on to condemn the murders, express grief for the victims and say that he aches “for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss” before making it clear why he chose to commute the death sentences.
“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” he said. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
The three remaining federal death row inmates include:
- Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who helped execute the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing
- Dylan Roof, who killed nine Black members of Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015
- Robert Bowers, responsible for the 2018 massacre of 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
