(Trinidad Guardian) Moments before robbing and murdering businessman Videsh Maharaj at his New Grant home yesterday morning, the gunman calmly greeted the victim’s wife as he walked past her.
Maharaj, the owner of V Maharaj Cooling Services, was shot at least three times and robbed of his cellphone and $8,000 as he sat in his van in the garage of his home at Torrib Tabaquite Road, Busy Corner.
In an interview hours later, his wife Sharmilla Maharaj, a teacher, said just before 8 am, she was standing in front of their home waiting for a taxi to go to work. Her husband came downstairs and opened the garage door. She heard the van start and his phone ring.
She said she was about to ask her husband to give her a ride out the street to get a taxi when the suspect walked past her.
“The guy told me good morning and I told him good morning. Then I noticed him walking down the hill (in her yard). I say, but what is he going down the hill for by the van by my husband. When I reached halfway down, I heard the guy say, ‘Give me your phone now or I will shoot you.’”
She said she ran out of the yard, flagged down a taxi that happened to be passing at that time and told the driver she believed a bandit was trying to rob her husband and had threatened to shoot him. The taxi driver took her to her in-law’s home to get help and on the way they called the police.
Maharaj said her husband’s brother went to the house and found him slumped in the driver’s seat of his van.
“He was not breathing. When I feel under his nose and on top of his chest, he was not breathing. A cousin came down and started to pump his chest. He got a pulse,” she said.
They took her husband to the Princes Town Health Facility where he was pronounced dead.
Maharaj said her husband was shot twice in the stomach and once in his leg.
“I am not sure if he might have put up a fight because he would also say give them what they want and let them go. He was a strong person. He was sitting in the van, ready to drive out. If I had stuck around I would have also gotten shot. That is the reality,” she said.
Trying to hold back tears, Maharaj said she did not know why her husband was targeted.
“It is a quiet area. Most of the neighbours are working. It really baffled me as to why this guy came for him, and how long he was targeting and watching him,” she said.
The couple had been married for 14 years and had a four-year-old son who was at his grandparents’ home at the time of the shooting.
Maharaj said her husband was law-abiding and family-oriented.
“I never thought that this would happen to us. We are normal, humble people. Anyone my husband knows, he would give them a ride,” she said.
While she was hopeful her husband’s killer would be arrested, Maharaj added: “But, we know this is Trinidad and how things are here.”
Officers from Homicide Bureau Region 3 are investigating.