ATLANTA _ Theirs was a whirlwind relationship: The 18-year-old running his dad’s hotel in Kentucky and the 20-year-old Atlanta native hired as a clerk.
Two months after Ricky Rai started dating Sparkle Reid in October 1998, she was pregnant with their daughter, Analla, and in March 2000 they were wed.
But the relationship ended as abruptly as it began. A few weeks after their marriage, she was found dead in her Union City, Ga. apartment, strangled with a vacuum cord and stabbed more than a dozen times.
The trial began on Monday for the unlikely suspect prosecutors say plotted to have the 22-year-old killed. Ricky’s 68-year-old father, Chiman Rai, a native of India and a former math professor at a historically Black college, could face the death penalty.
The motive: “Because she married his son, because she had a child with his son, and, ladies and gentleman, because she was Black,” prosecutor Sheila Ross argued to jurors.
Defense attorneys contend the case is not so cut-and-dry. Attorney Don Samuel acknowledged Chiman Rai was “not crazy” about his son’s relationship, but said he would never pay someone $10,000 to have her killed.
“It was outrageous,” Samuel said of the killing. “But members of the jury, that outrage, that tragedy, will not be mitigated or eliminated by the conviction of an innocent man.”
