Guyanese Alim Hassan, 31 on Thursday pleaded not guilty to the capital murder of his pregnant wife and her relatives in an arraignment before a New Jersey judge.
Marlyn Hassan, 30; her sister, Sharon Yassim, 30; and their mother, Bernadette Seajatan, 49, were all killed in a vicious rampage on July 30, 2002 in which the women received nearly 70 knife wounds, prosecutors said.
According to a report in the Jersey Journal, Hassan’s arraignment was postponed several times while he underwent psychological evaluation, but on Thursday his attorneys, Adam Jacobs and Michele Adu- bato, said preliminary results of the testing have caused them to rule out claiming Hassan is incompetent to stand trial.
Instead, the attorneys entered a plea of not guilty on behalf of their client, who sat silently in green prison garb, his hands cuffed behind his back.
The attorneys then asked for a 60-day adjournment to regroup, given the results of the evaluation, and Hudson County state Superior Court Judge Elaine Davis set July 15 for the start of the trial.
When Hudson County sheriff’s officers led Hassan into the courtroom, the eyes of seven of the slain women’s family members locked on him and followed him unblinking across the room.
Baldeo Seajatan lost his wife, two daughters and twin unborn grandchildren and he said he does not know how he managed to survive the loss and the grief of the funeral - except by the strength of his hatred for Hassan, the newspaper reported.
“I am 100 percent convinced that he will be found guilty, and I hope he gets the death penalty,” said Baldeo Seajatan.
“He stabbed my wife 27 times, my daughter Sharon 19 times and my daughter Marlyn 23 times. I will never recover from this. I still spend sleepless nights.”
Hudson County Assistant Prosecutor Mary Ellen Gaffney would not comment on the motive in the murders, but Seajatan said he believes the killings were motivated by religion.
He said Hassan is Muslim and his daughter, Marlyn, was Hindu. When she became pregnant, they began arguing about which religion the children would be taught, said Seajatan, 52, an NJ Transit bus driver.
Family members of the victims grumbled about the new 60-day adjournment, saying justice is taking too long. Hassan’s arraignment was delayed three times, and the July 15 date for the start of the trial is two weeks shy of the one-year anniversary of the killings.
On the morning of July 30, Yassim’s two sons, Chris, 2, and Andrew, 6, woke up in their Fox Place home to find the bloody bodies of their mother, aunt and grandmother. They ran across the street and told a neighbour, who called police.
Hassan, a native of Guyana, was pulled off a Greyhound bus at a border crossing near Buffalo, N.Y., by Canadian police and arrested on the same night of the slayings.
In the courtroom on Thursday was Donna Duesbury, 32, who lost her aunt and cousins on the day of the murders. She was also the first family member to arrive on the scene and learn of the tragedy.
“When I got there, Andrew and Chris were in the street and I grabbed them and started walking toward the house, and Andrew said they were all dead,” said Duesbury. “I looked up and saw a bloody handprint on my aunt’s bedroom window.”