Lovely Varughese’s quest for justice took four and a half years. But the jury took just seven hours to convict Gaege Bethune of murdering her son Pravin.
When the verdict came down, Varughese said she sobbed.
“I said a prayer in my head, and mind. I said, ‘thank you Jesus.’" Varughese said. "Pravin’s day has come, he can now rest in peace. Four years and four months exactly.”
She said her family endured every minute of the trial including when medical experts discussed and showed autopsy pictures.
“All of us had our heads buried in our laps the whole day,” Varughese tearfully recalled. “I had seen bits and pieces but my husband and my youngest daughter had not seen anything. It was very hard.”
But nothing prepared Varughese for the shock she got when Bethune’s defense attorney Michael Wepsiec brought up the discovery of college paper Pravin wrote on the terror group ISIS. Lovely says she felt it was an attempt to put her son, the victim on trial.
“If Pravin heard that, he would just come out of his grave,” Varughese said. “It was a project that he was doing for school. His classes were on terrorism that semester and he was a criminal justice major.”
Illinoi State’s Attorney appellate prosecutor David Robinson said that Bethune gave Pravin a ride in his pickup truck and they searched for drugs. Bethune punched him during a roadside fight and Pravin ran into the woods and froze to death. Bethune was reportedly offered a plea deal but declined, choosing to go to trial. He now faces at least 20 years for the first degree murder conviction.
When asked if Varughese had any sympathy for Gaege Bethume, she said it’s a hard question.
Local
"I was looking at him. He’s my son’s age," she said. "I used to think in my head I wish he would come up and say I’m sorry. That would have been enough for me.”
After the verdict, the Varughese family visited their son’s grave.
“We just told him, now you can rest in peace,” Lovely Varughese said. “ I don’t have to worry about what happened that night anymore. I’ll see him one day,” she smiled.
