Recent killings bring focus to domestic violence

In some communities, two homicides in a year would be considered a low number.

In Centre County, it’s a dramatic increase.

Two murders in two months? That’s something that has not happened in years.

“We are very fortunate in Centre County in our crime demographic. While it is changing, like everywhere, we are traditionally low in violent crime,” said District Attorney Stacy Parks Miller.

Philadelphia police are reporting 229 homicides as of Nov. 1. In Allegheny County, the number is around 40.

On Wednesday, Vladimir Podnebennyy, 63, appeared in Centre County court for his preliminary hearing. He is charged with first- and third-degree murder, felony aggravated assault and misdemeanor possession of an instrument of crime in the Oct. 26 stabbing of his wife, Natalya Podnebennaya, 58, in her car in the parking lot of their College Township home.

That incident came just weeks after the August shooting of Realtor Nuria Kudlach. Her husband, Alois Kudlach, is awaiting trial in that case. As of his Oct. 7 formal arraignment, he was pleading not guilty and requesting a jury trial.

“This will make my fourth homicide and it is four too many. Three have been husband and wife,” said Parks Miller.

“It is a heavy weight on our community to have two so close, back to back,” she said. “The most dangerous time for a woman is when she is leaving and one just left and one was about to leave. The most challenging thing about this type of crime is never being able to do enough. My office administers a STOP grant that pays for salaries at Women’s Resource Center and State College PD for a police officer to focus on domestic violence. We work as a close team to help victims of domestic violence. The Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence task force meets monthly and is made up of so many people who dedicate their lives to helping victims in Centre County get out of their situations.”

Most of the county’s few murders have been domestic, like Amy Homan McGee’s 2001 murder at the hands of her husband, Vince, or one of Parks Miller’s first major cases as DA, Samuel Boob’s murder for hire by his wife, Mirinda, in 2009. Then there are the acquaintance crimes, like the 1999 drug-related murder of Oscar David Camargo by Thomas Huddleston and Heath Quick.

But the county is not without its random attacks.

Avinash Kaushal, 50, was working at a Snow Shoe convenience store when he lost his life to a 2001 machete attack by Eric Jerome Fante, now serving a life sentence at Retreat state prison in Luzerne County. Fante was on a crime spree that stretched from Georgia to Tennessee to Pennsylvania and ended when he was apprehended in New Jersey.

State College Police Chief Tom King said that violent crimes in general are less common in Centre County, but murders are very rare.

But when they do happen, they are usually domestic.

The key to handling those, he said, is addressing domestic issues early. The chief’s department has a dedicated three-person team set up to intervene with domestic violence, something he says has shown real results since its inception.

“But then you turn around and have two fatal incidents in six-seven weeks,” he said. “Sometimes you do all you can and it still isn’t enough.”

In addition to the problems of the relationship dynamics in a domestic case, King said the Kudlach and Podnebennaya cases had the added challenge of dealing with multicultural issues, and in Russian-speaking Vladimir Podnebennyy’s case, a language barrier.

Those are issues King said the local law enforcement has to tackle as State College becomes an increasingly global community, drawing residents from countries and cultures that look at domestic issues in different ways.

If the murders themselves are few and far between, the unsolved ones stand out by their rarity. In 50 years, there are just two, both young female Penn State students; Betsy Aardsma at Pattee Library in November 1969; and Philipsburg-native Dana Bailey in her State College apartment in March 1987.

Parks Miller is hoping that there are no more unsolved cases, and hopefully, no more homicides at all.

“Since I have been DA, we have instituted a Lethality Assessment that municipal police use to screen situations on every domestic violence calls in the county to assess whether a situation is potentially lethal to offer services to prevent this type of escalation,” she said. “My office gets that information. We work so hard to intervene, treat, prevent and be proactive and protect the victims. We want to be a resource, we want to provide relief, we want to help and we still realize, we have more work to do. We will get justice for these victims, but I would have rather I never heard their names in a homicide case. I will hold these men accountable, but we all wish they were silent success stories of women who got out. That is what is so hard about these cases.”

This story was originally published November 2, 2015 at 9:40 PM with the headline "Recent killings bring focus to domestic violence."