Rohit Deepak Singh ex-boyfriend OF young Auckland mother Arishma Chand has been found guilty of her murder.
Rohit Deepak Singh has been on trial at the High Court in Auckland.
On Tuesday, after less than an hour of deliberation, a jury delivered its verdict finding him guilty of murder.
On the morning of November 12, 2017 Chand was found dead at her home in Manurewa after she had returned home with her boyfriend.
Rohit Deepak Singh was infatuated. A 42-year-old divorcee from Fiji, his prospects for love, marriage and children were bleak when he met Chand, who had also moved to New Zealand from Fiji. She was a package deal; bringing her daughter from a recently ended marriage to the relationship.
Singh was a long-standing friend of her father’s so the couple kept their relationship secret. They spent roughly six months together while she boarded at his home in south-east Auckland’s Flat Bush, but things changed when she fell pregnant.
Chand didn’t want to have a baby with him. She had an abortion and began to pull away from him, deleting photographs off her phone and telling friends and family she didn’t want to marry him. She ended the relationship in August 2016, but it was far from over. Singh refused to accept they had broken up. He stalked, messaged, talked about and obsessed over her. The extent of his infatuation became clear to police when they went through his phone and found screeds and screeds of messages sent from him to her in a one-sided conversation.He messaged her on an almost-daily basis.
The night she was murdered, Chand had known something wasn’t right. She’d spent the evening celebrating her boyfriend’s birthday at SkyCity before the pair returned to her family home just before 1am. They had just settled in the lounge when they heard a noise outside. They investigated but found nothing. Her boyfriend was hesitant to leave before her parents got home, but she told him they weren’t far away, and he was tired. As she watched him get into his car, she noticed something peculiar; a rock sitting on the front deck. It hadn’t been there when they arrived. She called out to her boyfriend, but he said not to worry. Chand’s parents were leaving a friend’s place in Māngere when they received a call from her. She wanted to know when they would be home as she was worried someone was outside the house. They told her they weren’t far away; they pulled into the driveway 16 minutes later.
The day Chand’s parents gave evidence they each described arriving home to find their daughter in a pool of blood. She had been stabbed in the back, arm, left side and, fatally, the groin. Her head had also been repeatedly struck with a weapon, fracturing her skull. Stab wounds to her hands indicated she had tried to shield herself from the attack. There was nothing her parents could do and, as the house filled with her mother’s screams of anguish, her father told her not to touch Chand; their daughter’s body was now part of a crime scene.
Singh’s DNA was found underneath Chand’s fingernails, her blood was found in the footwell of his car, and he was placed in the area of her home at the time of her killing.
The jury took 45 minutes to find him guilty of murder, and today he was sentenced to life imprisonment with a minimum non-parole period of 19 years.
Singh’s lawyer asked the judge to consider Singh’s cognitive abilities, saying he had communication difficulties and borderline abilities so prison would be a tougher environment for him. But Justice Powell told Singh, “I do not accept level of cognitive ability or communication issues provide any basis that prison will have a disproportionally negative effect on you. There is also no evidence before me that there should be adjustment on compassionate or medical grounds. In particular, no evidence before me to suggest that you had a difficult upbringing… Overall, there can be no doubt, that your calculated, brutal and callous murder of Arishma in her home on 12 November, 2017, was an evil act, the consequences of which can never be undone.”
Chand’s parents, sister and 3-year-old daughter were in the courtroom to see Singh sentenced. Afterwards, Brett Shields, an acting detective and senior sergeant, spoke on their behalf. “They were expecting a 17-year sentence so anything on top of that was a bonus for the family. They are dealing with a very tragic case… It’s closure, it’s a chance for them to start rebuilding as a family.”
SOURCE: Rnz
