- Wednesday, April 23, 2025
As per investigations, Chandra reportedly crashed his vehicle into another vehicle carrying six youngsters in January 2020.
By: Shubham Ghosh
AN Indian-origin man in his 40s has been sentenced to life without parole in connection to killing three teenage boys in California in January 2020 after they pranked him by ringing his doorbell and running away.
Anurag Chandra was convicted of three counts of murder and as many counts of attempted murder while a special circumstance allegation of several murders was found true by the jurors in a Riverside County courtroom earlier this year.
According to a release from a district attorney office last week, it took the Riverside County jury only a few hours to return guilty verdicts against Chandra, Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) reported.
As per investigations, Chandra reportedly crashed his vehicle into another vehicle carrying the youngsters on Temescal Canyon Road on the night of January 19.
The victims were identified as Drake Ruiz and Daniel Hawkins of Corona and Jacob Ivascu of Riverside. All of them were 16 at the time. In the crash, the 18-year-old driver of the teens’ vehicle and two other boys aged 13 and 14 were also injured but they survived. The Toyota Prius vehicle carrying the six teens was forced off the road by Chandra and it rammed into a tree.
The convict returned from the scene of the accident without having reported about it, the IANS report added.
As per the release, the victims were having a sleepover and dared one of the friends to play the doorbell prank. They drove to a nearby house, a probe by the California Highway Patrol said. There, one of them rang the doorbell of a home on Modjeska Summit Road and ran back to their car.
It was reported that Chandra, a resident of the house, went after the teens’ car in his car, an Infinity Q50.
He re-ended the Prius and sideswiped it till the teens stopped. They then made a U-turn to escape but Chandra did not give up and at one point of time, raised the car speed to nearly 100 miles per hour and rammed it into the back of the Prius, causing it to crash into the tree.
According to the IANS report, Chandra also pleaded guilty to misdemeanour charges of spousal battery and child endangerment.
He has been in custody at the Robert Presley Detention Center in Riverside since his arrest in January 2020, in connection with the homicide case.
