New York, Feb 6 (IANS) The lone survivor of a racially-motivated shooting spree in 2000, an Indian American, has died in hospital.
Sandeep Patel was paralysed from the neck down after he was shot in the neck and upper back by Richard Baumhammers, a former lawyer, on April 28, 2000. He was shot at his sister Leena Patel's grocery store in Scott, Pensylvania, where another Indian American was killed. 

Baumhammers, a white, had then gone on to kill four more people, all minorities, in the Mount Lebanon and Scott, Robinson and Center townships in Pensylvania.

According to media reports, Patel, 32, who had been confined to the wheelchair after the incident, died Saturday after complications arising out of pneumonia at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC), Passavant, in Pensylvania.

"He died a very peaceful death," a report in the Tribune Review quoted Dr. Mohan Chabra, a cardiologist and friend of the family, as saying. "He didn't suffer at the end. The way he died was so peaceful." 

Patel was given the city's first Voice of Tolerance Award in 2002 for speaking out against racial intolerance. 

"He believed in God and he believed in humanity," Chabra told the Tribune Review. "He forgave Richard Baumhammers. He had pardoned Richard Baumhammers in his mind."

Baumhammers was convicted in 2001 on five counts of first degree murder and one count of attempted murder. He is now on death row. 



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