Jurijus Kadamovas

Victims
5
Years active
2001 - 2002
Location
California, USA
Method
Shooting
Status
Arrested in February 2002. Convicted in the Central District of California of three counts of hostage taking resulting in death, conspiracy to commit hostage taking resulting in death, conspiracy to launder monetary instruments and conspiracy to escape from custody, and sentenced to death on March 12, 2007. His death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole in December 2024, when the outgoing President commuted 37 of the 40 federal death sentences. Held at USP Terre Haute, where in January 2023 he became the named plaintiff in a class action brought by the ACLU of Indiana against the Bureau of Prisons, alleging that solitary confinement in the Special Confinement Unit was so isolating as to violate the Eighth Amendment.

Kadamovas was born in 1966 in Lithuania and came to the United States, where he worked with Iouri Mikhel, a Russian, in the Los Angeles area.

Between October 2001 and January 2002 the two of them, with accomplices, abducted five people connected to the local emigre business community, held them, demanded ransoms from their families, collected around a million dollars, and killed all five. The bodies were weighted and dropped into the New Melones reservoir in northern California.

The five were Meyer Muscatel, fifty-four; Rita Peckler, thirty-nine; Alexander Umansky, thirty-five; George Safiev, thirty-seven; and Nick Kharabadze, twenty-nine.

They were arrested in 2002. Both were convicted in federal court and sentenced to death on March 12, 2007.

They are on federal death row at Terre Haute. The federal government carried out thirteen executions in 2020 and 2021, its first since 2003, and none since; neither man was among them.

The ransoms were paid in several cases and the victims were killed anyway, which is the fact the prosecution led on. This entry and the entry for Iouri Mikhel describe the same five deaths, and the count should not be added twice.