A 29-year-old Baltimore DJ and trained chef whose nocturnal social life and recreational drug use played out at trial was found not guilty Wednesday of strangling his longtime girlfriend.
As his parents gripped each other?s hands and a woman in the fourth row of the packed courtroom gallery held up a cell phone, apparently transmitting the verdict, a Baltimore Circuit judge acquitted Thomas Ryan Jr. in the death of Anuradha Ramasamy. Her body was found on May 28 in her Remington apartment, in what the prosecution called a staged suicide.
“I believed in my son from day one,” said Thomas Ryan Sr., a veteran of law enforcement in Philadelphia, calling Baltimore?s criminal justice system “troubled.”
“I haven?t been able to eat,” said Samantha Wales, 30, a friend of the defendant. “The amount of evidence they had, I think it?s a travesty that they put the family through this.”
Prosecutor Brian Fish said the case hinged on the defendant?s statement to police the day he said he found Ramasamy, 26, dead in her apartment. Taking the stand at trial, Ryan described in detail going to check on her after she failed to return his late-night calls, and discovering her hanging from a ceiling fan, with her knees on the mattress below.
A medical examiner testified that Ryan?s account was impossible, saying that the way her blood settled indicates her body was face-down for hours before she was found. He said Ramasamy probably died on May 27.
“Your honor, innocent men don?t lie,” Fish concluded. He later said Ramasamy?s parents were “obviously very disappointed” in the verdict.
Referring to autopsy results and court testimony, Judge Paul Alpert called Ramasamy and Ryan both “the victims of drug abuse” and alcoholism. But he concluded that with a defense expert disputing the medical examiner?s account, there wasn?t enough evidence that Ryan committed murder.
“He might have strangled her,” Alpert said, “but I cannot convict somebody on what might have happened.”
Wales said the murder case ravaged friendships once intertwined around Ramasamy and Ryan. Within hours of the verdict, messages appeared on Ramasamy?s MySpace page seeming to underscore that difference in perspective:
“I feel like we let you down,” one person wrote, “but I have a feeling it?s not over yet!”
