GRISLY WIFE SLAY ON QUEENS STREET
A jealous husband fatally stabbed his wife with a large kitchen knife on a Queens street — and then tried to saw her head off with the blade in front of horrified witnesses, police sources said Monday.
Prem Rampersaud, 50, who arrived from Guyana on a tourist visa a week ago to join his wife in New York, confronted her Sunday night, just before midnight, at the corner of 124th Street and 103rd Avenue in South Ozone Park as she left her shift as a cook at a nearby cafe.
Rampersaud stabbed Baldeo Rajwantie in the chest, shoulders and hands, police said.
Two passers-by then saw Rampersaud kneeling over her body and making sawing motions — and heard the sound of a blade cutting through bone.
Without realizing what was happening and seeing the fallen woman, one of the witnesses asked, “Do you need help?”
Rampersaud turned toward them — and they then noticed he was decapitating the woman, according to police.
Rampersaud, who was caught nearby and charged with murder, allegedly told cops he killed Rajwantie, 46, because he believed she was cheating on him with someone she met online — but the couple’s daughter said that wasn’t the case.
“He was a drunken type. He always threatened he would kill her. He was very ignorant, he was accusing her of cheating. He always beat her,” a distressed Shalhi Ronaldo Ramjaiwan, 30, one of the couple’s four children, said by phone from Guyana.
“My dad was a very bad person. My mom didn’t deserve to die like that.”
Rampersaud was still wearing his pajama bottoms as he was escorted from the 106th Precinct station house Monday afternoon. He was later arraigned on a murder charge at Queens Criminal Court and held without bail.
He complained to detectives that he gave Rajwantie approximately $9,000 to move to the United States about a year ago.
She had been working at The Oasis cafe for about a month, and all was well until her husband arrived, co-workers said.
A server at the cafe, Nazia Rajpaul, 25, says the victim pleaded with staffers to protect her.
“He came here on a Friday at 5 p.m. and he was mad drunk,” Rajpaul said. “We had to get the bouncer to take him out.”
A woman renting an apartment to the couple said Rampersaud had only recently arrived in the area.
“A mutual friend of ours asked me if I could keep him because he was looking for a job,” said the woman, who requested anonymity. “I tried to help him out. He said his wife was cheating on him, but that was BS.”