Parasurama Rabindranauth, the 28-year-old Guyanese man on trial in Connecticut, US for murdering another Guyanese man said he was in fear for his life when he fired the shot that killed Michael Sembhudyal.
According to the online publication Republican American, Rabindranauth, who faces a murder charge in Waterbury Superior Court, told a jury yesterday he never intended to kill Sembhudyal as the two stood in the kitchen of a Baldwin Street, Westbury home in 2009.
“He was coming toward me,” Rabindranauth said. “I took the gun out of my pocket and squeezed the trigger”, the report quoted him as saying
Rabindranauth, who migrated to Queens, N.Y., when he was 14, never denied shooting Sembhudyal, but said he was terrified of him because Sembhudyal had threatened to have him killed, the report said.
Guyanese Yashoda Ramlal last week told the court that she heard a “pop” and saw her ex-fiance and murder accused Rabindranauth stuffing a gun into his sweatshirt.
Parasurama was arrested in Miami last January, five days after the shooting by multiple law enforcement agents, who took him into custody before he could board a Guyana-bound plane.
According to Republican-American, Ramlal told the court that she heard a “pop” while she stood in a third-floor bedroom of her family’s home.
She said he looked into the kitchen, saw her cousin, Sembhudyal with a look of shock on his face and saw her ex-fiancé, Rabindranauth, stuffing a silver gun into the pocket of his sweatshirt.
“I saw him stumble into the living room, then I saw the blood,” she said of Sembhudyal, according to Republican-American.
She was testifying in the Waterbury Superior Court during the first day of Rabindranauth’s murder trial. The 28-year-old faces decades in prison if convicted.
