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Insane, or a Menace II Society?

S Pasha

As Narinder Kaur recounted to the jury how her husband Paramjit Singh's murder had affected her life, she could not help but cry.

Her sons, then 12 and 7, would forever be orphans. Without money, she and her children had to leave their apartment, sharing rooms at friends' homes, sometimes in basements. "I lost everything," she sobbed.

The Virginia jury could not help but feel pity for her. They submitted her husband's killer Sterling W Fisher spend life plus 30 years in prison for robbing and killing Paramjit Singh.

Fisher, 29, was convicted of first-degree murder for the July 1995 stabbing at the Texaco station on Route 123 in Vienna, Va. Prosecutors charged Fisher with capital murder, both because the killing occurred during a robbery and because he already had killed one man in 1995 and shot a convenience store clerk in 1996.

Fisher allegedly told a friend he 'did the same thing as in the movie Menace II Society,' when he repeatedly stabbed Paramjit Singh.

He also told a friend that the attack was spurred when he 'exchanged words with the store clerk, became angry and flipped out.' Fisher reportedly was high on the drug PCP [phencyclidine] at the time.

At 5'4 and weighing about 150 pounds, Paramjit Singh was a smallish man, but a number of slit wounds on his arms suggested he tried to defend himself while being stabbed.

His resistance only intensified the savage attack. He suffered six stab wounds to the head. The knife attacks fractured his skull. He also suffered nine stab wounds to the face and neck.

According to court documents, Fisher grabbed the station's surveillance video recorder and tape, imitating what the gunmen do in the movie, and offered to show it to his friend.

Vienna police searched the home of Fisher's mother in February 1996 and seized a video recorder and a tape labeled 'Homeboy Front Row Entertainment'. In Menace II Society the characters repeatedly play the tape of their killings for friends.

Deputy Commonwealth Attorney Raymond F Morrogh said his research into Paramjit Singh revealed that the victim 'was by all accounts a gentle, good person.'

'He was a hardworking family man,' Morrogh said.

Like the jurors, Morrogh pities Narinder Kaur. He said to support herself and her children, she got a job as a convenience store clerk-and has been robbed at gunpoint as well.

"It's a tough situation for her," he said. "To go through all this hardship, to lose her husband, to have to work like she does..."

After charging Fisher, prosecutors charged Donnell R Taylor, 31, with first-degree murder last September; and in January, they charged Lathius Crawley, 35, with robbery. Taylor's footprint was found inside the Texaco, and he told Vienna police he snatched the store's surveillance video recorder while Fisher 'stabbed that man.'

Prosecutors believe Crawley waited outside in a car. Taylor and Crawley's trials are pending.

Though he had pressed for Fisher to receive the death penalty, Morrogh felt justice has been done. However, he sadly acknowledged that Narinder Kaur's loss can never be regained.

'This was a vile, brutal killing,' he said. 'It was so undeserved for Paramjit to go like this.'

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