Patriot Brief
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What Happened: Former employees kidnapped, stabbed, and fatally shot CEO Tushar Atre after alleged workplace tensions.
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Why It Matters: Anger over pay and treatment spiraled into a calculated, brutal murder plot involving multiple accomplices.
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Bottom Line: No workplace dispute justifies torture and execution. Justice is catching up to every man involved.
The shocking case out of Santa Cruz reads like a Hollywood thriller gone dark. A millionaire tech and cannabis CEO, Tushar Atre, was kidnapped, stabbed, and shot by his own employees after what they claim was a toxic, abusive workplace. But no matter how awful a boss may be, nothing justifies the grisly torture these men carried out.
Prosecutors described an execution-style killing, complete with zip ties, a sock in his mouth, and AR-15 rounds fired into his head. This is what happens when entitlement, resentment, and lawlessness collide. The justice system is finally closing in, but none of this should have ever happened.
Too Fab reports:
Six years after the at-first mysterious death of a millionaire tech and marijuana CEO, a second employee has been convicted of his murder, along with two other men, which he says was in response to the victim creating a hostile and torturous work environment
Prosecutors in court said that the defendant, and three accomplices, murdered Tushab Atre at the same location where two of them said they were abused under his employ.
Kaleb Charters, a 25-year-old former U.S. Army National Guard member, was 19 years old when he allegedly dropped three people off in the wealthy oceanfront Pleasure Point neighborhood in Santa Cruz for them to rob and kidnap his boss, Atre.
Charters then drove to the marijuana farm where he had worked to “prepare the crime scene where his former boss would be killed,” as Los Gatan reported it — even if that might not have been the original plan. The other three men kidnapped the victim and arrived later in a stolen vehicle with an already stabbed and bleeding Atre.
Charters’ brother Kurtis and brother-in-law Stephen Lindsay, a fellow former National Guard member, were previously convicted of first-degree murder and are serving life sentences. Joshua Camps, who has admitted to stabbing and later shooting Atre in the head, is waiting for his trial to resume, per KRON 4.
Santa Cruz County Assistant District Attorney Michael McKinney told jurors in court, “It’s fitting where they chose to take him to.” He described the defendants allegedly forcing Atre to “get on the ground! Put your hands behind your back!” at his home and how he was ultimately left “shot four times, stabbed seven” at his cannabis farm.
Both Kaleb Charters and Stephen Lindsay had worked for Atre at this farm, where they claimed their boss withheld $200 from their paychecks and then humiliated…
Photo credit: Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office