On March 3, podcaster Zohreh Sadeghi requested a protection order, saying she was being stalked by a listener and his behavior had left her with a "deep-seated fear" for her safety. A week later, he broke into her Seattle-area home and murdered her and her husband. In the protection order request obtained by KIRO7, the 33-year-old said Ramin Khodakaramrezaei, 38, "has bursts of anger and is completely delusional. These delusions make me fear for my life and the lives of my loved ones." She told the judge that she had just had major back surgery, Fox reports. "My mobility has been affected, and I need care 24/7," she wrote. "This makes me fear about my ability to respond to a crisis."
Sadeghi asked for the order to last 99 years, saying the stalker "has said many times that nothing short of his own death would make him leave me alone, so I would like the order to last as long as possible," NBC reports. She said the harassment included voicemails in which the stalker threatened to burn himself in front of her home. Police say Sadeghi, a software engineer with a Farsi-language podcast on tech issues, initially "struck up kind of a friendship" with Khodakaramrezaei but she asked him to stop contacting her after his behavior "escalated." She said he began trying to contact her up to 100 times a day and showed up uninvited at her home with flowers. She said Khodakaramrezaei contacted her husband 20 times a day and also tried to contact friends and neighbors.
Police say Khodakaramrezaei, a long-distance truck driver based in Texas, took his own life after shooting the couple in their Redmond home. Sagheri first contacted police about the stalker in December. Police say the protection order was granted and they were also seeking Khodakaramrezaei to arrest him on stalking charges, but his job made it hard to track him down, BuzzFeed reports. "This was an individual who, by virtue of his profession, moved from place to place, so it was difficult to, I’ll say, pin him down to a location. It wasn't as though he was local and we had a local address to where we could either do surveillance or find him, serve the protective order, et cetera," said, Redmond Police Chief Darrell Lowe.
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Police said they had been working with the victims on extra security measures including surveillance cameras. "In this case, the victim did everything that they possibly could," Lowe said. "Unfortunately, this person broke into their home and killed her. It is a tragic event." After Khodakaramrezaei broke in, Sagheri's mother was able to flee the home and call 911.
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