Hyderabad: Telangana’s minister for NRI affairs, K. T. Rama Rao on Thursday said that he was deeply disturbed and extremely saddened by the utterly reprehensible and callous comments of a US cop about the death of a student from Andhra Pradesh after she was hit by a speeding police car.
Minister KTR urged the US ambassador to India, Eric Garcetti to take up the matter with US government authorities and deliver justice to the family of 23-year-old Jaahnavi Kandula.
He also requested Minister for External Affairs S. Jaishankar to take up the matter with his counterpart and demand an independent investigation.
“It is tragic that the life of a youngster with soaring ambitions has been cut short but what’s more tragic & shocking is that a limited monetary value has been ascribed to her life,” KTR posted on X.
Jaahnavi Kandula from Kurnool district of Andhra Pradesh, was killed in January after after being hit by a police vehicle driven by a Seattle police officer called Kevin Dave.
She was a Master’s student at Northeastern University’s Seattle campus.
Bodycam footage of a Seattle cop joking about the death of Jaahnavi has surfaced, triggering an outrage. India has urged the US to conduct a thorough investigation.
In a video released by the Seattle Police Department on September 11, a cop can be heard joking and laughing while discussing the accident.
In the clip, Seattle Police Officers’ Guild Vice President Daniel Auderer, in a call with the guild’s president, can be heard saying: “She is dead” before bursting out into laughter and calling Ms. Kandula “a regular person”.
He further said, through bursts of laughter: “Yeah, just write a check. Eleven thousand dollars.”
The clip ends with him saying: “She was 26 anyway, she had limited value,” getting her age wrong.
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