A shocking killing took place at Azzahra Medical Center in East Jakarta on November 9 when a doctor named Ryan Helmi had an altercation with his wife, Doctor Letty Sultri and fatally shot her six times.
Helmi’s murder trial concluded yesterday at the East Jakarta District Court with the judges sentencing him to life imprisonment, rather than the death penalty prosecutors had demanded.
Mohammad Rifai, Helmi’s lawyer, had argued that his client should only get 15 years in prison because the killing was done in the heat of the moment and not premeditated. During the trial, he had argued that Helmi only happened to have a gun on him at the time because he used it for shooting practice in Bogor.
“So a life sentence is not in accordance with reality,” Rifai told Tempo following the verdict, adding that while he was grateful his client didn’t get the death penalty, he would still consider appealing.
According to the police account, Helmi came to the the medical center Letty was working at on November 9 to confront his wife. After a heated argument, he shot Letty six times in the face and chest. He then ran away from the clinic but surrendered himself to police two hours later while carrying two pistols.
The motive given by prosecutors in the trial was Helmi’s extreme anger over Letty’s attempts to divorce him. Records showed that she had already begun divorce proceedings at the East Jakarta religious court.
Although Helmi was also a doctor, he was not employed at the time of the murder. There were reports that he had lost a previous job at another clinic for allegedly raping an employee, although the victim chose not to report the crime to the police.
Letty’s family said Helmi had been physically abusive numerous times before and decided to divorce him because she could not take it anymore. Police admitted at the time that Letty had reported the abuse to authorities in July and used evidence from their investigation as evidence in her divorce filing in the religious court.
However, police claimed they had never pursued criminal charges against Helmi because Letty had “made peace” with her husband. The murder victim’s family fiercely denied that and said they were still waiting for police to pursue domestic violence charges against Helmi up until the day of the shooting. Letty’s family also says that Helmi had threatened to kill his wife several times should she go through with the divorce.
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