Jurors Find Aurora Man Guilty Of Groping Woman On Flight From Vegas

CHICAGO (STMW) -- A serial groper from Aurora has been convicted for a third time of touching a dozing woman on an airline flight.

Software consultant Srinivasa Erramilli, 45, visibly gulped, and later put his head in his hands after a federal jury took four hours to find him guilty.

Erramilli groped a woman sitting next to him on a flight to Chicago from Las Vegas, the jury found, convicting him of abusive sexual conduct.

Judge Joan Lefkow allowed Erramilli to remain free on bond until he's sentenced. He faces up to two years behind bars.

The case against the Indian national stemmed from an incident on a June 2011 Vegas-bound Southwest Airlines flight. At some point, Erramilli touched a sleeping woman's inner thigh. After the woman woke up and angrily yelled at and hit him, Erramilli allegedly had the gall to tell her that though the gropes were inadvertent and that he too had been asleep, she had "liked it."

Jurors were permitted by a judge to hear evidence from Erramilli's two prior convictions, a 1999 case in which he grabbed a sleeping woman's breasts on a Northwest Airlines flight from Detroit, and a 2002 case in which he fondled another woman's breast on Northwest flight from San Jose.

In the most recent case, evidence showed that Erramilli had been sitting between the alleged victim, who was in a window seat, and her husband, who was in the aisle seat.

Several other passengers on the flight said they heard the woman exclaim "Get your hands off of me!" when she awoke.

(Source: Sun-Times Media Wire © Chicago Sun-Times 2012. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)