A victim’s dismay at evidence ignored
‘This was preventable,’ survivor says of rape kits left on shelf
Ann Reidy hadn’t planned to walk down Kains Avenue, but she found herself there staring at the apartments on the narrow street in Albany, trying to find the one where it happened. The one where Randhir Kaur was killed.
Reidy never met Kaur, a 37-year-old dentist from India who was attending dental school at UCSF so she could practice in the U.S. But they share a connection — police say DNA evidence links the man Reidy was able to fight off in a February 2015 attack in her Berkeley home to the rape and fatal shooting of Kaur 10 days later.
Neither woman should have been a victim, Reidy said as her eyes reddened, her tone wavering between outrage and heartbreak.
“There is no doubt in my mind that this was preventable,” Reidy said.
The man accused of killing Kaur and attacking Reidy is also suspected of abducting and raping two teenagers in Berkeley in 2008. That crime is only now being prosecuted because Berkeley police waited nearly six years before testing a rape kit from the case. Investi-
gators pulled it from a storage shelf only after Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley instituted countywide testing of long-ignored rape kits.
DNA evidence from the 2008 rape kit turned out to be a match to Keith Kenard Asberry Jr., a career criminal who had been in the state’s database of felons since 2005, authorities said. Berkeley police have never explained why the kit went untested for so long.
When the DNA evidence came back, Berkeley police issued a warrant for Asberry — then took nine months to track him down and arrest him. During those nine months, he allegedly attacked Reidy and killed Kaur.
“This was a failure,” Reidy said in her first interview since she was attacked.
She’s speaking out now in part because state lawmakers are considering bills that would require that all rape kits be tested promptly and that authorities count the number of untested kits statewide. Both measures face critical votes Friday in the Legislature, and it’s unclear whether they will pass.
Asberry, 34, is being held without bail in Alameda County and is scheduled to enter a plea Thursday on charges related to the three cases, as well as a fourth case involving the home-invasion rape of an El Cerrito woman in 2005.
Until two months ago, Reidy was actively avoiding her own case, leaving letters from the district attorney unopened, calls unreturned. Three years after the crime, she wasn’t sure she wanted to open the compartment in her mind where she had stored the trauma.
Then a neighbor mentioned news reports that her attacker had been accused of killing a dental student. She saw Kaur’s photo online, a smile on her face, a white dental lab coat around her shoulders. Reidy read a Chronicle story about a national backlog of untested rape kits and how the 2008 rape kit could have led police to Asberry long before the crimes against her and Kaur.
Reidy, an intensely private woman whose name is redacted in court filings, is trying on the unfamiliar shoes of a public advocate, pushing for justice that feels less about her and more about a woman she never met.
“I have this overwhelming sadness for this woman,” Reidy said. “I know what it’s like to feel that terror. That guy was here just 10 days before. I don’t know how to describe it, but I feel this closeness to her.”
California law says law enforcement agencies should promptly test rape kits. It doesn’t say they have to.
It’s a word state Sen. Connie Leyva, D-Chino (San Bernardino County), wants to change. Her bill, SB1449, would require law enforcement agencies to submit evidence from a rape kit for testing within 20 days and mandate that labs complete their analysis within 120 days.
A companion bill, AB3118 by Assemblyman David Chiu, D-San Francisco, would require law enforcement agencies and crime labs to report to the state Department of Justice how many rape kits they have in storage. No one knows how many rape kits have been shelved statewide, but the Joyful Heart Foundation, an advocacy group, estimates that California has more than 13,000 untested kits.
Both bills will be heard Friday by appropriation committees in the Legislature. Similar efforts in the past have not fared well.
“It’s not a secret that thousands of rape kits have not been tested across our state,” Leyva said. “Many have been sitting there and have been sitting there for many years.”
A rape kit includes blood, urine, hair, body swabs and photos taken after a sexual assault. Specially trained nurses scour a victim’s body during the hours-long process, looking for traces of the attacker’s DNA.
In cases where the suspect is not known, the hope is that DNA evidence will point to someone in a database of people who have been arrested on felony charges. But sexual assaults are often committed by someone the victim knows, leading many police agencies to shelve those rape kits in cases where consent is the question, not the suspect’s identity. It’s one reason mandating prompt testing for DNA matches has stalled before in the Legislature — police say it’s costly and not always necessary.
In the dusty piles of sexual assault evidence, however, it has become clear that it isn’t always cases involving consent that end up on shelves.
“This case ... is exactly why there should be no question that we should be testing these kits,” said O’Malley, the Alameda County district attorney. “The tragedy of the homicide — I remember when it happened. It was, who could have committed this crime? It was horrible. This is exactly why we need to test them.”
“Don’t call tonight. I’m studying.”
That is what Randhir Kaur had told her family on Sunday, March 8, 2015. She had attended afternoon prayers at a Sikh temple in El Sobrante, stopped by the grocery store, and had planned to spend the evening doing laundry and getting ready for an exam.
Kaur was in regular contact with her family, her phone a steady buzz of updates from back home in India. This night, she told her family, she wouldn’t be answering.
The next day, Kaur didn’t show up at the clinic where she worked while doing her studies at the UCSF School of Dentistry. Two patients were waiting, school officials said in a phone call to her cousin, Inder Singh.
Singh knew it was unusual for Kaur, a cautious and dependable woman with whom he had spent his childhood in India, to miss an appointment. He figured there must be a good reason — maybe she was sick or had car trouble.
But she didn’t pick up when he called.
At her apartment on Kains Avenue, he saw her brown 1999 Toyota in seemingly normal condition and headed upstairs.
The door was unlocked. Singh opened it a few inches before he hit Kaur’s foot. She was on the floor, in just a bra and black sweat pants. She was face down, her long black hair obscuring the gunshot wound to her left eye. She had been dead for hours.
“I couldn’t talk,” Singh said. “I was sitting by my car, crying like a lunatic.”
There were signs Kaur fought her attacker. Beyond that, Singh is cautious about what he shares. He has no interest in reliving that day. But mostly, he’s afraid he will say something that will hurt the case.
It’s taken more than three years for a suspect to be charged, a delay that has confused and angered Kaur’s family. Asberry was arrested March 15, 2015, on the warrant for the 2008 rapes — one week after Kaur was killed — and has been in custody since. He wasn’t charged with Kaur’s killing until two months ago, despite police saying DNA linked him to the crime.
Kaur “came here for an education and a good life,” said Preet Walia, Kaur’s aunt. “We believe in fate and karma, but to end up like this in a box going back home, no one deserves that.”
And the thing is, Walia says as she fights a quiver in her voice that threatens to choke her words: “This didn’t have to happen.”
For months after her attack, Reidy said, she felt a perpetual scream lodged in her throat, one that occasionally fought free without warning.
Shopping for pepper spray at REI in the weeks after the attack in the spring of 2015, she started screaming for no reason. She couldn’t be alone in her house. The terror was overwhelming when her husband went to work. When she returned home from an outing, Reidy would summon neighbors to look in closets and behind shower curtains to make sure her attacker hadn’t come back.
She hid pepper spray in every room, including the one where she found the man on Feb. 26, 2015.
She had been unloading groceries when she heard a noise in her window-lined living room. She walked right by the man at first as he stood in an alcove next to the stairs.
When she turned around, he lunged at her, grabbing her neck and throwing her to the hardwood floor. She can’t remember how long she fought him, a floor lamp toppling, a table overturning. She remembers the smell of cigarettes on him.
“I was screaming at the top of my lungs,” Reidy said. “I thought, I’m going to die here. I honestly thought I might very well die right here. These may be my last screams. Then miraculously, he fled out the door.”
It took much longer to get him out of her head. There was a lot of therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder, she said, and careful conversations with her two young children about why Mom was so angry and scared all the time. She suffered a herniated disc in her neck.
She is still healing, she said, but the fear has subsided. She plans to testify against Asberry. She wants to push law enforcement to test all rape kits.
She remembers the kind and diligent Berkeley police officers who responded to her 911 call. One pointed to blood on her white shirt, asking if she was bleeding. She wasn’t. The shirt was bagged as evidence, which would eventually be the break in the case. Police say the DNA on her shirt matched Asberry’s.
But she is still disturbed. She wants an explanation and an apology from Berkeley police for missteps she said allowed a dangerous man to remain free.
Why did they ignore the 2008 rape kit? Police received it not long after two young women, ages 19 and 15, reported that a stranger had abducted them at gunpoint on Allston Way in Berkeley and forced them to drive around before raping and robbing them on a dead-end street. Why did it take nine months to arrest Asberry on a warrant? Why wasn’t this a priority before there were new victims?
“The Berkeley Police Department does some things extremely well, and they made a massive error,” Reidy said. “These can both be true. I think they need to publicly explain themselves and apologize. It’s not about me. A woman died.”
Berkeley police spokesman Sgt. Andrew Frankel said the department’s practice now is to test all rape kits immediately. Beyond that, Frankel had no comment. The judge in Asberry’s case has ordered police not to discuss it outside court.
When the crime-scene tape came down, Kaur’s apartment was turned over to her family.
Singh and his uncle, Jaipal Walia, cleaned up her blood and packed her clothes, pictures, decorations, everything that was left behind. Her schoolbooks, supplies and other items were donated to UCSF in hopes they could help a needy dental student.
Kaur’s slaying has splintered the family. There is a sense that someone failed to protect her, that one phone call or impromptu visit could have prevented what happened. The killing has cost Kaur’s father, a prominent attorney in India, and mother their health, said Preet Walia, her aunt.
Kaur lived with the Walias for a few years in Fairfield before they helped find her the apartment on Kains Avenue in Albany, closer to school and public transit. Kaur helped her aunt cook and they took nighttime walks together. Walia feels her niece’s absence.
Walia used to return to India regularly to visit family, but she said she has not been able to bring herself to travel home since the killing.
“I don’t want to face her mother,” she said through tears.
A week after Kaur’s slaying, UCSF held a candlelight vigil for her. The school awarded her an honorary degree, a kindness that touched her family.
Jaipal Walia tapped the photo button on his shirt with the picture of his niece when he heard that a woman in Berkeley had a message for him. Reidy wanted them to know she often thinks of Kaur. That she feels a connection to their niece.
“Thank God she is safe,” he said. “We have a big loss, no doubt.”