Cold case brings Indian community together

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. – For quite a while, families from the growing Indian community in this Pennsylvania college town shared sweet and savory sweets and drank warm cups of chai as they chatted ahead of their monthly story hour.

The children sat cross-legged on the floor, listening to Hindu folklore tales passed down to them from their parents. This particular month, the group celebrated Navratri, a nine-day Hindu festival to celebrate the divine feminine.

While the stories brought joy to the faces of those listening, a sense of gloom permeated the air once story hour ended. Something was on everybody’s mind, something very heavy.

Bhushan Jayarao and Latha Bhushan began to remember the Vedam family, who started story hour, and the tale of their son, Subramanyam "Subu" Vedam, convicted of a murder more than 40 years ago that he insists he did not commit.

“It was so tough to take – especially being new to this country – an Indian being incarcerated. When you start hearing people talk about it over a period of time, you still fail to generate the idea that (Subu) did something wrong,” said Jayarao, one of the first Indian residents in town, recalling his reaction to Vedam’s conviction and his feelings through the years since.

Like others in State College, Jayarao has been reflecting a lot on Vedam’s case lately. The reason? Because, after fighting for decades, Vedam will get one more chance to prove his innocence.

Thanks to the recent discovery of evidence that was previously withheld from the defense, Vedam’s case will return to the Centre County Courthouse on Feb. 6-7. The local Indian community has mobilized to ensure that this time Subu — the literal first son of their State College community — gets what he they think he was denied in the 1980s, a fair hearing.

Why now?

In 2021, defense lawyer Gopal Balachandran, who has worked with the Innocence Project and is Vedam’s current attorney, asked the Centre County district attorney’s office to open Vedam’s case file. They discovered exculpatory evidence — material they argue could have cleared Vedam of guilt — wasn’t given to the defense during the two trials in the 1980s, when Vedam was convicted of shooting and killing Thomas Kinser in a wooded area south of State College.

Now, Balachandran said, he and his team are using the newly found evidence to try and establish Vedam’s innocence, and to claim that his case was a violation of Brady v. Maryland, a precedent-setting decision which stated prosecutors must turn over any piece of evidence to the defense if it could suggest the defendant is not guilty.

“The evidence supports what Subu has been saying all along: He didn’t do this,” Balachandran said.

“They (the FBI) were being intentionally obfuscatory and revealed as little as possible. It was their pattern and practice. They would turn over summaries of their conclusions, but they wouldn’t turn over the underlying data. It’s like reading a scientific paper and just getting the conclusion and not the data or results.”

The prosecution, led by Joshua Andrews, the first assistant district attorney of Centre County, declined comment on this and all questions related to the case.

Case history

Vedam and Kinser were friends – that much we know. How long, like a lot of points in this case, is a matter of debate. Prosecutors say it was in high school, while the Vedam family says it was earlier.

In any event, both were in the Alternative Program in the State College school district, now the Delta Program. The program was created as a way for students to take responsibility for their own learning through an individualized curriculum.

While Kinser ended up leaving the program, the two kept up a friendship. In the summer of 1980, they even lived together. At the time, Vedam was taking classes at Penn State, and Kinser was working at Charleen Kinser Designs, a small group of toy designers.

In the fall, Vedam returned to his family home, and Kinser and his girlfriend, Beth Warner, moved into an apartment complex called Lion’s Gate. From here, things become unclear.

For reasons never fully explained in court, the pair on Dec. 14, 1980, traveled to Lewistown, about 30 miles southeast of State College. Vedam returned, Kinser didn’t. His body was found in a nature area between the two communities months later, on Sept. 27, 1981 by hikers. He’d been fatally shot.

Key evidence ignored?

It turns out there was hard evidence the defense never saw: the actual size of the bullet wound in Kinser’s head. Prosecutors never turned that over to Vedam’s defense, even though they had the precise measurements.

During the original trial, the FBI’s medical examiner created a report that contained the exact measurements of the bullet wound. The measurements concluded “the hole in Kinser’s skull was simply too small to accommodate a .25 caliber bullet,” according to a petition amendment filed by defense lawyers on Oct. 13, 2023.

Even factoring in for a margin of error, the size of the bullet was 5.9 millimeters at its smallest and 6.1 millimeters at its biggest, according to the FBI report. During the initial trial, the commonwealth’s expert testified the standard size of a .25 caliber bullet is 6.35 millimeters.

Vedam’s defense concluded that, because of those two points, the bullet wound in Kinser’s head was too small to be from a .25-caliber gun— the type of gun Vedam allegedly owned. Instead, the evidence demonstrated that a .22-caliber weapon was what killed Kinser, according to the defense’s argument.

Furthermore, a police diagram, which also wasn’t turned over, indicated four .22-caliber bullet casings surrounded Kinser. No .25-caliber bullet casings were depicted, according to the court exhibits.

Growing up Indian in State College

Recent U.S. Census Bureau estimates say that people who chose “Asian alone” to identify themselves make up about 10% of the 40,000 people in State College, the borough that is home to Penn State. But back in the 1960-80s the Asian community as a whole was much smaller, let alone the Indian subgroup.

Vedam’s father and mother, Kuppuswamy and Nalini Vedam, moved to State College in 1956. According to Saraswathi Vedam, Subu’s older sister, they were the first Indian people in town. At that time, the United States granted only 100 visas a year to Indians. Kuppuswamy was selected and came to town to do a post-doctoral fellowship in crystallography.

Saraswathi was born a year later at Mount Nittany Medical Center, then called Centre County Hospital, and she was the first Indian born in the area.

The Vedams decided to move back to India because Saraswathi’s grandfather had died, making her mother homesick. During this time, Subu was born, but when he was 9 months old, the Vedams returned to State College.

“We grew up with our feet in two different worlds. I'd say I was the only Indian girl in the entire elementary school, junior high, high school of about 600 students,” Saraswati said. “And Subu (was) also the only Indian boy.”

“In our family and culture, there’s a strong emphasis on family being everything,” she added. “There is a strong value and connection in the relationship between brothers and sisters.”

Saraswati said she was brought up to value her relationship with Subu and recalled memories of her youth: walking back to home from school and seeing Subu with his nose against the window pane of their house’s front door; teaching Subu how to ride a bike; and, sharing meals with all their friends in their neighborhood.

She says the two also had a “unique” experience with religious exploration. There was no Hindu temple nearby, but their father wanted them to have a religious education growing up.

So, Saraswati and Subu spent many of their childhood weeknights learning about the important Hindu texts, like the “Mahābhārata” and “Ramayana,” from their father in a story hour-esque way and discussed the ideas of the Hindu philosophy, like dharma, which references to one’s duty in life.

Kuppuswamy believed all religions could teach the same important values, which he learned in the Quit India Movement, a campaign demanding the end of British colonialism on the subcontinent. Because there were no temples in State College at the time, he sent the two with his co-workers to other religious places.

“We went to a friend's meeting house, a Presbyterian church, a Catholic church and a synagogue,” Saraswati said.

Subu really took to all of these experiences across all religions and faiths, she added. “He had this sense he was a citizen of the world,” his sister said. “The values taught in all of these places were similar; about kindness, peaceful engagement, compassion (and) charity.”

The one belief he held onto the most was nonviolence.

“Subu was so nonviolent when we were growing up, that he would rather shoo out flies than have our mom swat them because he didn’t like that,” Saraswati said. “He was never in a fight growing up and never a rough kid at all.”

As Subu got older, he found that many of his interests were “not in the mainstream,” according to his sister. He was an avid juggler, table tennis player and motorcyclist.

These interests extended into Subu’s academics. He had initially struggled in a traditional high school setting because the ways he thought about life and the ideas he had couldn't be properly expressed there.

He switched to the Alternative Program in the State College school district, where he designed his own curriculum, and graduated in the 99th percentile. From there, he went onto Penn State and worked as a lab assistant, and while he was there, began to mature, Saraswati said.

The following year was his parents’ 25th wedding anniversary. Subu wanted to plan a big party. He and his sister spent the whole summer planning the party.

The party took place in August 1981 in the backyard of a family friend’s house. The event also served as a send-off for his parents, who left for a sabbatical in Stuttgart, Germany, later that month.

One month later, Kinser’s body was found, and months after that, Subu was arrested on drug possession charges, LSD specifically, and a charge related to a stolen synthetic ruby from Penn State’s Materials Research Lab.

Subu called Saraswati to tell her he was arrested, but to not alert his parents.

After those initial charges were dropped, Subu was charged with first-degree murder in June 1982.

It didn’t take long for the family to get support from the Indian community, which had grown to about 40 families by the time the allegations against Subu were made. As soon as the local paper, the Centre Daily Times, began covering the case, nearly the whole town became involved, according to Saraswati.

“We didn't have to organize the community. At the time, it was a big town and gown conflict,” Saraswati said. She remembers Kinser being portrayed as a “local boy” and Subu as a foreigner who couldn't adjust to the United States.

“The Indian community was very shaken by it ... (prosecutors and media) basically took his cultural background and alienated him, othered him from people on the jury who were middle-aged all white," she added.

Building community

While the Vedams raised Saraswati and Subu, they fostered community and ensured their cultural identity wasn’t erased.

Each time a family came from India, friends recall that the Vedams taught them how to navigate their new home, invited them to any and all functions, cooked them food and showed each family where to go to buy Indian groceries that weren’t obviously accessible in State College.

"My mother and father became the substitute parents and grandparents, and when they were younger, they were the older siblings to (the new families),” Saraswati said. “All the 60 years they lived there, they looked after the growing Indian community.”

Neela and Hemant Yennawar are research professors at Penn State who came to State College in 1992 for post doctoral work. Immediately upon moving to the town, they were told to contact the Vedams. To this day, they both say the Vedams were like their parents away from home.

The two were also familiar with Subu, and took his parents to visit him a few times.

“I found him to be the perfect gentleman,” Hemant said. “Although he has been in the four walls of a prison, he just seems to have a phenomenal knowledge about everything and would always ask specific questions about us— he was very much aware of all the things happening in the community.”

Through efforts like these, the community initially began getting involved with Subu, and just like the Vedams did with their culture, they did with Subu. They ensured he wouldn’t be forgotten.

Over time, Subu took the initiative to maintain those connections and wrote to nearly everyone he could. According to Zoë Miller-Vedam, one of Subu’s nieces, he is more interested in talking to the community around him about their lives than he is talking about his own experiences.

Miller-Vedam, who calls him Subu Mama — meaning uncle in Tamil, said he was always engaged with their lives.

“Despite the fact that he spent over 40 years of his life in prison, he's always just really retained that interest and commitment to community, wanting to hear people's stories, wanting to engage with them in the spaces that they're comfortable with and they're excited about,” Miller-Vedam said.

Pushing for an appeal

Building this community made the latest efforts regarding Subu’s case very easy. When the bullet-size evidence came to light, Miller-Vedam said the window to try and appeal anything was only a year. In an effort to move fast, Subu’s lawyers suggested asking for letters of support because it can help petitions advance.

Subu’s lawyers had said it would be great if the family could get 10 letters. Even though his parents have both died, the family kept their old rolodex of contacts. They asked everyone they could for a letter, some of whom still lived in State College, and others across the world.

In 10 days, Subu and his family got 150 letters of support.

“There was story and story after story after story of people just talking about the relationship they have with Subu Mama and just these beautiful narratives of how, despite the fact that many of these people have only known him since he's been incarcerated, they have been able to build these this relationship by correspondence," Miller-Vedam said.

The support has been sustaining itself ever since. Last July, people packed the Centre County Courthouse and held signs outside to support the efforts to get Subu a new trial.

The growing support expanded beyond the Indian community. Criminal justice advocates from different spaces, like Central Pennsylvania United and the Pennsylvania Prison Society, have demonstrated for Subu, now 63 years old.

While his future isn’t clear, it’s clear that those who know Subu want to see him exonerated.

And for the family who built the State College Indian community through telling stories of Hindu folklore and sharing the secrets of how to survive as an immigrant at Penn State, things are beginning to come full circle.

“It's a through line from 1956 to right now,” Saraswati said. “I feel like my parents are with us."

A timeline of events in the murder case

Key dates in the prosecution of Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam for the shooting death of Thomas Kinser.