‘Arab-looking’ Guyanese was killed in revenge attack for 9/11
-Suspect serial killer tells cops
Stabroek News
May 17, 2003
“Arab vibes” drove suspected thrill killer Larme Price to gun down four immigrant merchants - including a Guyanese man - in twisted revenge for the World Trade Centre attacks, he confessed to cops, according to court documents.
According to an article in the May 2 edition of the New York Daily News, Price, 30, described himself as the “good guy ... the American,” who was driven to carrying a gun by voices coming out of his cell phone, he told police.
The Brooklyn man pleaded not guilty to a 25-count indictment, charging him with first- and second-degree murder, attempted murder, assault and weapons counts in a February and March murder spree that horrified the city.
In his chilling April 3 confession, Price told Detective Tony Viggiani he cried for days after the terror attacks. “There was a lot of people I wanted to have situations with,” he told Viggiani. “I’m the good guy. I’m the American.”
The article reports that Price said he used his .40-calibre semiautomatic for the first time in the Feb. 8 attack on Guyanese immigrant John Freddy, 43, who is of Indian descent, in a Queens grocery store.
“I hear and feel ‘Arab vibes,’ and they were bad,” Price said. “The one Arab is talking to the other in another language, and it doesn’t sound good. I then shoot the guy sitting down, one time in the head.”
Later that day, he saw an “Arab” - actually Indian immigrant Sukjit (Sammy) Khajala, 50 - looking at him in Khajala’s Brooklyn convenience store.
“I was about to ask him for Doublemint gum, but instead I sense something from him. I take out my gun and shoot,” Price said.
Soon after his daughter’s March 1 birthday, he used the bathroom at Albert Kotlyar’s laundromat in Brooklyn and found the 32-year-old Ukrainian immigrant dozing, he said.
“I say, ‘Excuse me, You falling asleep?’ [He says] ‘I’m up now.
Can I help you?’” Price wrote. “He gave me a bad look, and this bad situation occurs. Shot him one time in the head.”
On March 20, he became upset when he couldn’t understand what Abdul Nasser Ali, 54, from Yemen, was saying to another man, the statements said.
“Both [men] watching me a lot,” he said. “Older guy sitting down gets it one time in the head,” Price said, noting that he wounded Yakoob Aldailam, who survived the attack.
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes has until Aug. 29 to decide whether to seek the death penalty against the alleged killer, whose relatives say the slayings could have been avoided if hospitals had not denied Price mental health care.
Price, who was expressionless during arraignment in a Brooklyn courtroom, is being held in the psychiatric ward at Kings County Hospital, said his attorney, John Youngblood.
