A podcast turned into a horrifying true crime story early Friday, after its host and her husband were murdered in their home in Washington by a crazed fan.
The killer, trucker Ramin Khodakaramrezaei, had stalked his victim for “many months,” before he broke into her house in the Seattle suburb of Redmond through an open window at 1:45 a.m., police said.
Khodakaramrezaei gunned down podcaster Zohreh Sadeghi, 33, and her husband, Mohammed Naseri, 35, before turning his weapon on himself. Sadeghi’s mother managed to escape and called the police from a neighbor’s house.
Naseri, who was shot in the upper torso, tried to flee the scene, before collapsing by the front door of the house, according to Redmond Police Chief Darrell Lowe. Officers attempted CPR on Naseri until paramedics arrived but were not able to resuscitate him.
Lowe told The Daily Beast that Khodakaramrezaei first came into contact with Sadeghi after tuning into a podcast that she was “affiliated with” on the subject of “gaining employment in the tech industry.”
According to Redmond Police Department spokesperson Jill Green, “[Khodakaramrezaei] started emailing her and messaging her, just starting conversations about the podcast, and my understanding is that they became friends.” Cops could not immediately provide the name of the podcast.
But at some point, the pair’s relationship took a concerning turn, and Sadeghi became uncomfortable with the content of Khodakaramrezaei’s messages and how often he was contacting her, according to authorities.
Lowe said he was first made aware of “harassing behavior” by the suspect in December. Khodakaramrezaei would repeatedly contact Sadeghi by text and over the phone, once calling her over 100 times in a single day, he added.
According to Lowe, this harassment eventually escalated to in-person stalking. He said Khodakaramrezaei had visited Sadeghi’s residence in Redmond before the night of the murder and followed her to a conference in Denver “in the latter part of 2022.”
The upscale suburb where Sadeghi’s $1.6 million home is located is most famous for being the site of Microsoft’s headquarters.
Lowe said after his first contact with Sadeghi, she reached out again in mid-January, at which point the case was assigned to an investigator who began to follow up on it, attempting to contact Khodakaramrezaei to gain a statement from him and let him know Sadeghi no longer wanted to be in contact with him.
“Our detectives had warrants to get information from his phone and were trying to serve the no contact order to the suspect [but] had not done so yet. Being that he is a trucker, he’s hard to pin down,” Green said.
Lowe said it was not until March that a judge issued a temporary protection order, which the King County District Court says can be obtained by people who “are in immediate danger.”
That protection order, which would have forbidden Khodakaramrezaei from contacting Sadeghi but not provided any material protection, had not yet been served at the time of the murder.
“I think the key piece here is that a protection order is simply a piece of paper that does not prevent a person from causing harm to another person,” Lowe said. “It just puts them on notice and gives law enforcement the ability to arrest a person should they violate said protective order.”
Lowe said Sadeghi had no idea that Khodakaramrezaei, who had no criminal record prior to the murders, was planning to pay her a visit, and that if she had the police would have been there to issue the protection order.
Jamie Lynn Burns, a resident of neighboring Kirkland who is currently preparing to move into a house across the street from Sadeghi and Naseri, said the couple were “super welcoming” and called the news of their deaths “shocking.”
“They were just so friendly and inviting,” Burns said. “We were like, ‘Oh my gosh, we couldn’t have found better neighbors.’”
But Burns said when she visited the house a week and a half ago, she remembers seeing Sadeghi’s mother “very diligently watching out the window.”
“I wonder … now if she was maybe, you know, like on a high alert,” Burns said.
“It’s a really small, safe community, so it just feels all the more shocking to have something like that happen in Redmond of all places,” she added.
