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Hi, I'm Jillian and you are listening to episode 4 of the Court Junky

Podcast.

And if you like the podcast, please leave me a review on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you're listening from.

It's also important to me to tell you that my objective with this podcast is not to glorify these

cases, but to shine more light on them. Now on to the episode. Today I'm going to be covering the

case of a teenager whose mysterious death has a small college town in southern Illinois divided

and a family desperate for answers. This is the case of Praveen Variegase.

I first heard about this case about two years ago. My mom, who likes to send me links to various

news stories, sent me a link to a story about Praveen and I remember immediately thinking that

there was something fishy about it, about what really happened, about the way the case was handled.

I don't know, things just seemed off. And now, fast forward two years, I've started this podcast

and there's been so much new information that has come out about this case, that I just knew I

wanted to talk about it. But I'm not going to cover this one by myself. I reached out to Praveen's

mom, lovely Variegase, who's going to help me tell the story. This case takes place in February

2014. Praveen Variegase was a 19 year old sophomore at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale,

Illinois. He was a first generation Indian American, the only son of lovely and Matthew Variegase.

He grew up with two sisters, Priya and Prithi, who just adored their brother.

Lovely worked as a nurse and her husband Matthew was a respiratory therapist.

The family lived in Skokie, Illinois for years before settling into a suburb called Morton Grove,

which is about 13 miles north of Chicago, where they lived since Praveen was 10 years old.

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