Joseph Pallipurath testified in his defense Thursday against charges he murdered his estranged wife and another man and attempted to murder a third person in a Clifton church in 2008, describing an arranged marriage in India that quickly went sour and ultimately turned deadly. He went to St. Thomas Syrian Orthodox Knanaya Church on Third Street — unseen — two Sundays prior to when the shootings occurred, he said.
Then came Sunday, Nov. 23, 2008: “I stood in the vestibule. I opened the door and looked at her,” he said of wife Reshma James. “I was trying to talk to her alone, somehow, but she was always with her aunt and uncle.” “Why did you want to see her alone?” asked defense attorney Harley Breite of Wayne. “To convince her to come back to me,” Pallipurath said. He said he never intended to hurt anybody that day. “She didn’t respond. She just cried,” he said. “I grabbed her right arm.” With that, he started leading her out of the church without any physical resistance from her, he said.
Then two men intervened — one being Dennis John Malloosseril, 25, of Hawthorne, who also died in the shooting. “I pulled my gun up, I pointed it at Dennis, he pushed my hand and that’s when the gun went off and I saw my wife drop. And then I just blacked out,” he testified before jurors and state Superior Court Judge Salem Ahto in Paterson. “I don’t know what happened after that. I just lost it.”
Malloosseril’s mother, seated in the audience, wept during Pallipurath’s testimony and ultimately fainted. She had to be carried out the courtroom by relatives, briefly interrupting the proceedings. Through his attorney, Pallipurath maintains he is not guilty of murder because his actions were not knowing and purposeful, two aspects required for a murder conviction. Prosecutors, however,. have said Pallipurath went to the church armed with two handguns and more than 100 rounds of ammunition and intended to take his wife back or kill her if she resisted, Breite showed the jury a roll of rope and a hook that were found by authorities after his client was arrested in a Georgia Hotel, and asked Pallipurath to explain what those were. He said he planned on using them to hang himself, but police got to him before he could.
Pallipurath and James met through an ad in a magazine in India his grandfather ran seeking a wife for him, Pallipurath said. Though he and Reshma James hit it off the first meeting, James’ family quickly withdrew her as a candidate for the marriage, he said, after they did a “background check” on him that portrayed him negatively. The two continued to see each other and eventually married anyway — but the influence of her family slowly but surely became too powerful for him to compete with. Pallipurath admitted to having slapped James twice and said marriage counseling did no good.
Things eventually got to the pojnt where James ignored him altogether. “I was pretty upset, it hurt me a lot, and there was nothing I could do about it,” he said. “I was real hurt that things were wrong between me and her.”
After separating, he would hold secret watch outside the Hawthorne home where James stayed with cousin Sylvie Perincheril, he said, to get a sense of her living habits. Pallipurath, 29, of Sacramento, Calif., is said by authorities to have traveled cross-country in late 2008 in pursuit of James. Prosecutors allege — and according to his own sworn videotaped statement to police — Pallipurath rented a room in Paramus for a few weeks that November and stalked his wife without her or her relatives seeing him, finding where she lived and studying her living habits.
Pallipurath shot James in the head, killing the 24-year-old aspiring nurse. Malloosseril also was killed by a gunshot to the head. Perincheril, who was alongside James, also was shot in the head but survived her injuries. She testified this week from a wheelchair, saying she has been paralyzed since the shooting and offering what she remembered of that day. Summations are expected Monday, followed by jury deliberations.
No comments:
Post a Comment