(NewsNation) — A Washington state podcaster and her husband were found dead in their home, along with a man who had been accused of stalking her for months.
Police responded to a report of shots fired at around 1:45 a.m. Friday in Redmond, a suburb of Seattle according to the local newspaper. According to the Redmond Reporter, Ramin Khodakaramrezaei, 38, had started listening to 33-year-old Zohreh Sadeghi’s podcast, and the two become friends.
However, the Reporter said, the situation escalated, leading Sadeghi to file a no-contact order against Khodakaramerezaei. The Associated Press reported that after meeting online, the two met in person last summer, but by that following fall, harassing phone calls and threats started.
In one instance, Khodakaramrezaei threatened to show up at Sadeghi’s home and set it on fire. He would leave voicemails saying that he wouldn’t stop unless “he killed himself or died.”At one point, police said, Khodakaramrezaei called Sadeghi more than 100 times in one day.
Officers found Sadeghi’s husband, Mohammad Milad Naseri, 35, lying on the floor near the door of the house. When they pulled him inside, they saw he had a gunshot wound. Authorities performed CPR, but Naseri died at the scene. Sadeghi and the suspects’ bodies were found inside the home.
“This is the absolute worst outcome for a stalking case. This is every victim, every detective, every police chief’s worst nightmare,” Lowe said at a Friday afternoon media briefing.
Sadeghi was a software engineer who had previously worked at Promontory MortgagePath and studied in the University of Washington’s graduate programs, according to her LinkedIn profile. Nasiri had been working at Amazon since January 2022, and he said in his blog that when he was growing up in Iran he was ranked as the second-best singer in Tehran in 2007 before he went on to study at the Sharif University of Technology. The couple married in 2011 after moving to the U.S.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.