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Good deed gets rewarded with death

Suman Guha Mozumder in New York

Rupinder Singh was planning to spend the night at his uncle's residence in Brooklyn last Thursday when he got a call from his mother, who asked him to return to his home in Jamaica, Queens.

So Singh headed home in his Lincoln Navigator SUV (sports utility vehicle) about 10.30 that night. But the 26-year-old graduate from St Johns University never made it.

In what William Allee, chief of detectives at the New York police department, described at a news conference on Monday as a "monstrous" murder, Singh was shot dead by people he offered help.

According to Allee's account, widely reported in New York newspapers, soon after leaving his uncle's home Singh stopped at the gas station on Belt Parkway, where he found a group of five persons who were stranded because their car had broken down. Singh, known for his benevolent nature, offered them a ride to Brooklyn.

"They all get into this van and the end result was that he was taken into the park, shot down, left to die," Allee was quoted as saying by The New York Times.

"We believe he pleaded for his life. He told them to take the vehicle and just leave him alone," Allee said on Monday after the arrest of James Johnson and his girlfriend Darshen Kingsberry of Atlanta on the weekend following a tip-off.

A spokesman at the Brooklyn district attorney's office said both had been charged with two counts of murder, three counts of robbery and criminal possession of weapons in the second degree. "They are likely to be arraigned tonight [Monday] and if convicted the two could face 25 years to life in prison," he added.

Police started looking for Singh after he failed to return home till Saturday morning and worried family members called them. On Friday morning, the police had found the unidentified body of a young man in Lincoln Terrace Park at Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights.

After Johnson and Kingsberry were arrested, the police traced the SUV and found that it was registered in Singh's mother's name. When police showed a photograph of the body found in Crown Heights to Singh's family, they identified him immediately.

"God gave us a gift with my son, and now he took the gift away," Singh's mother Amarjit was quoted as saying by the Daily News.

Allee described the killing, which has shocked the community, as an act of complete insanity. "He was doing a good thing, being a good citizen and a good New Yorker, and these monsters took advantage of that," he said.

Singh, who came to the United States from Chandigarh in 1994, several years after his parents arrived, planned to earn a master's degree in computer science by attending night classes and was about to get his first big job. His mother said Singh had told her that in September he would have a big surprise for her. "I will take care of you and my family. You won't have to work anymore," the Daily News quoted her as saying.

News reports described Singh as a quiet person who spent his time reading, studying and working on his computer. He was said to be very attached to his mother, who had visited Punjab recently to find him a suitable bride.

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