Indian origin man shoots brother dead, injures mother, kills self in New York

New York, June 10 (IANS) An Indian-origin man here shot his brother dead, injured his mother, and then killed himself, according to police.

Karamjit Multani, 33, shot his brother Vipanpal, 27, on Sunday in their home in the Richmond Hill neighbourhood and went out and turned the gun on himself at a place about two kilometres away, police said.

Police said that when they went to their house after getting a call about a shooting, they found Vipanpal "unresponsive" with several gunshot wounds, and their 52-year-old mother with an injury to her stomach. Later, Multani was found dead near a street corner with a gunshot wound to his head and a gun nearby, according to police.

The mother, who was not identified by name, was taken to a hospital where she was said to be out of danger.

Richmond Hill has a large concentration of Asians, most of them of Indian descent from India or the Caribbean, accounting for 26 per cent of the area's population.

According to the city, "The southern portion of Richmond Hill is home to several tight-knit communities, such as the Punjabi Sikh".

CBS New York reported that the men’s father, Bhupinder Multani, told the station that he did not know what set off his older son.

Asked by the station’s reporter if the sons had any issues, he said: "Not big problems. Sometimes little disagreements, no problems."

He said that the family had settled in for a quiet evening with pizza when Multani opened the door to his brother’s room and shot him without warning. The father said that he ran to the house of a neighbour to seek help. The neighbour told the station that when she entered the house she found Vipanpal wounded and pleading for help.

"He told me, 'Please, don't let me die'," the neighbour said, and died later "in my hands".

Jaspreet Singh, the brother-in-law of the two men, told the station that Multani "was one of the nicest, coolest guys, always joking around".

"What could be going on in his mind to explode like that," he wondered.

The New York Post reported that, according to his family, Multani was the father of three and was financially sound with no known problems. A neighbour, Alvin Debieen, told the New York Daily News that they thought it was firecrackers going off when they heard the sound, but when they heard the police sirens, "we kind of just figured someone was shot".

"It had to be something really serious or he just snapped," Debieen said.

A neighbour from where Multani’s body was found, told the newspaper that "His body was right there laid out in the open and there was a lot of blood".