Bronx nurse shot dead
'My mom died in my hands'
By NANCY DILLON and FERNANDA SANTOS
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
NY Daily News
April 28, 2004
A newly sworn citizen who put aside her marriage to give her sons a brighter future in America was killed yesterday in her Bronx home, cops said.
Waheeda Rohoman Khan, 37, a mother of two who toiled 12-hour shifts as a nurse, was hit in the back of the head and collapsed in her bedroom at 2131 Blackrock Ave., in Soundview, police said.
Cops want to question Khan's boyfriend, identified by neighbors only by his first name, Cecio.
Khan's 19-year-old son, Sefraz, saw his mother with Cecio about 1 a.m., cops and relatives said.
Sefraz Khan left the couple to buy the man dinner at a takeout joint, leaving his 13-year-old brother, Rehaz, asleep in his bedroom, cops and relatives said.
When Sefraz Khan returned about 3 a.m., he found his mother dead in a pool of blood, police said.
Terrified, Sefraz Khan awakened his brother, who wrapped a shirt around their mother's head in a futile attempt to stop the bleeding, relatives said.
"My mom died in my hands! My mom died in my hands!" Rehaz wailed to his mother's aunt Zerene Jalil, who went to the morgue to identify Khan's body.
"I saw the black body bag and it was so tiny. It didn't look like her," Waheeda Khan's heartbroken sister Azeema Garcia told the Daily News.
"I still can't believe it," Garcia, 31, said. "It's cold-blooded murder. Whoever did this has no heart."
Waheeda Khan was planning to rekindle the romance in her marriage by bringing her husband, Rafeek Khan, to New York, Garcia said.
She planned to fly to Guyana on Thursday, and may have invited her boyfriend over to break the news, cops and relatives said. "Perhaps he wanted to get more intimate and she didn't want that," Jalil said.
Born in India and brought up in Guyana, Waheeda Khan moved to New York in 1996 with her two sons, leaving her husband behind, relatives said.
She soon found work at the Hebrew Home for the Aged in Riverdale and saved enough to buy a brick house, which she tended well and appointed with elegant antique furniture for her and her sons, neighbors said.
Khan became a U.S. citizen nine days before her death, her sister said.
"She was so proud and excited when she got her citizenship," said Garcia, who became a U.S. citizen last month.
"Before we had our test appointments in March, I called and said, 'Let me test you over the phone,' and Waheeda said, 'No, I'm an American. I know all the answers.'"