The trial of a Guyanese man accused of attempting to murder two police officers in New York early last year started yesterday.
According to a Times Union report, if convicted Adrian Parbhudial faces 20 years to life in prison.
Chief Assistant District Attorney Phillip Mueller yesterday made submissions to the court before the jury selection in the case in a Schenectady County Court. Parbhudial, 25, is charged with shooting two city police officers who had responded on February 21, 2010 to the family’s home at 935 Maple Avenue, a day after other members and associates of the Parbhudial family allegedly ambushed and fatally shot Ganesh Ramgoolam on their dead-end street in the Vale Neighborhood.
The two officers, who were part of the department’s tactical unit that stormed 935 Maple Ave., were injured when Parbhudial, 24, fired a 12-gauge shotgun.
The Times Union reported that members of the Guyanese community have said the dispute was over a woman.
According to the prosecutor, two rival groups of Guyanese were partying with friends in separate homes a few blocks apart last winter when nasty cell phone calls and years of animosity erupted into a deadly confrontation on a city street. Prosecutor Mueller, the report said, explained that Ramgoolam found himself in the middle of a feud that stemmed from a wedding reception in Schenectady four years ago when members of the Parbhudial family got into an altercation with another group of Guyanese.
After the reception, some men went to the Parbhudial home on Maple Avenue, tried to kick in the door and broke some glass on it. Mueller said from inside the dwelling, someone fired a blank. Nobody was hurt, but Reuben Danesh Eudairam was arrested.
“He kind of became their worst enemy and all the people the Parbduhials were feuding with were his friends,” the Times Union quoted the prosecutor as saying. He said that police later discovered a .32 calibre blank pistol inside the Parbhudial home. “It shows the beginning of the feud that led to the death of Ganesh Ramgoolam.” Ramgoolam, 24, was friends with Eudairam.
Mueller said that Adrian Parbhudial mentioned the commotion at his home in a sworn statement during the probe into the police shootings but twisted the facts by telling investigators that he thought it was “the bad guys that came to attack my family and that’s why I shot.” Additionally, he also stated that the wedding brawl happened within a year and that the attacker broke into the family’s home and brutalized them, all of which were lies, Mueller added.
Adrian Parbhudial does not face charges in the February 20, 2010 murder, but several of his relatives do. They are his brother, Vishan Parbhudial, 23, and their sister, Angelene Parbhudial, 21, and her boyfriend Richard Baliraj of Queens as well as the Parbhudials cousin, Dhanashar Persaud, 23, also of Schenectady. All are charged with second-degree murder, gang assault, weapons charges, tampering with physical evidence and other charges.
The prosecutor detailed several other incidents, including reports of shots fired, that prompted Adrian Parbhudial to buy and test out the shotgun in the days before Ramgoolam was killed. Vishan Parbhudial suffered a broken jaw in a brawl at a local club and some of the Parbhudials and their friends trashed Eudairam’s car at a home on Lincoln Avenue in Hamilton Hill, it was noted.
The Times Union reported that Mueller told the court it was the nasty cell phone calls that apparently set off Ramgoolam and caused him and another man to drive to the Parbhudial home. With that, the Parbhudials began to pull weapons from out of closets and under the bed, the prosecutor said. “They go into ambush mode,” Mueller told the court, noting that the Parbhudials and their buddies essentially formed a triangular “killing zone” that Ramgoolam walked right into. He was shot five times and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Defence attorney Roy Nestler dismissed Mueller’s arguments as “a lot of speculation” and told Visiting Schenectady County Judge Richard Giardino that he objected to Mueller’s use of inflammatory language, like the word ambush.
