In a landmark judge-alone trial held this week, a 31-year-old Barrackpore resident has been handed the ultimate capital punishment for the brutal 2024 murders of his separated common-law wife and their 14-month-old child. Rishi Motilal, who also goes by the street alias “Cook Meat”, was found guilty on two separate counts of premeditated murder by Justice Nalini Singh on Monday, who formally sentenced him to death by hanging.
The guilty verdict follows the prosecution’s thorough presentation of evidence connecting Motilal to the fatal October 8, 2024 attack that claimed the lives of 31-year-old Tara “Geeta” Ramsaroop and the couple’s young daughter, Shermaya Motilal. Court proceedings laid out a grim timeline of the violence, which erupted inside Motilal’s Rig Road residence after a routine argument between the estranged couple escalated to lethal force. Per the case presented by the State, Motilal first assaulted Ramsaroop with an iron pipe before retrieving a cutlass, which he used to repeatedly slash his victim before cutting her throat. After killing Ramsaroop, he turned the weapon on their defenceless toddler to end her life as well.
Following the attack, Motilal fled the scene in a blue station wagon owned by a relative of Ramsaroop’s new romantic partner. Investigators later located the vehicle torched and abandoned in a dense, bushy terrain off Rochard Road in Penal, a finding that Motilal did not contest. He also entered a guilty plea for the charge of malicious property damage related to the arson, for which he was sentenced to time already served behind bars leading up to the trial.
A core pillar of the prosecution’s case rested on first-hand testimony of Motilal’s own confessions delivered immediately after the killings. Both his mother, Farisha Mohammed, and sister-in-law, Gayatri Motilal, told the court they received phone calls from a distraught Motilal, who openly admitted to carrying out the double homicide. An independent civilian witness corroborated this account, confirming that Motilal had made a similar admission to them as well.
In an effort to reduce the charges against his client, Motilal’s defence team mounted a provocation defence, arguing that the killings were not premeditated. Motilal testified that Ramsaroop’s comment that he would never be allowed to see their children again pushed him over the edge, saying he fell into a “dark hole” and could not clearly remember the sequence of events that followed. His legal team urged Justice Singh to reduce the charges from murder to manslaughter on these grounds.
Justice Singh ultimately rejected the defence’s argument, pointing to multiple pieces of evidence that proved Motilal acted with clear, deliberate intent to kill. She noted that the sequence of events—from Motilal choosing to arm himself with two separate weapons to the brutal nature of the injuries inflicted—demonstrated premeditation rather than a sudden, uncontrollable outburst of rage. She further highlighted Motilal’s own statement to police, in which he explained he killed the infant to prevent her from “suffering” without her mother, as additional confirmation that he made a calculated choice rather than acting out of uncontrolled passion. The judge emphasized that the deliberate manner of the child’s killing left no room for any finding other than intentional murder.
The prosecution team was led by barristers Dylan Martin, Josiah Soo Hon and Khi Cambridge, while Motilal was represented throughout the trial by defence attorneys Stephen Wilson and Ayanna Norville-Modeste.