NY subway death: Woman in hate crime against Indian fit for trial

New York: The Hispanic woman charged with murder as a hate crime for pushing Indian-origin Sunando Sen, 46, onto the path of an oncoming subway train has been found competent to stand trial. A judge on Monday declared Erika Menendez, 31, a drifter with a history of psychiatric problems mentally fit to stand trial. Menendez will be arraigned on the charge of murder as a hate crime when she goes back to court on 29  January. A judge had ordered a psychiatric evaluation for the woman last month when she appeared in court laughing and cackling without showing a smidgen of remorse. Mendez had laughed so hard during her arraignment in a Queens criminal court that Judge Gia Morris told her lawyer: “You’re going to have to get your client to stop laughing.” Prosecutors on 29 December charged Menendez with a hate crime murder after she shoved Sen, who was waiting on an elevated platform for a subway train, on the tracks as a 7 train entered a Queens station. [caption id=“attachment_588468” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  In this image provided by the New York City Police Department, a composite sketch showing  Erika Menendez. AP[/caption] Menendez ran off after pushing Sen from behind, but was arrested after a tip by a passer-by who saw her on a street and thought she looked like the woman in the subway surveillance video released by the police. Menendez made a statement at the police station revealing her terribly twisted mind. “I pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers. I’ve been beating them up,” Menendez told police, according to the district attorney’s office. Cops said Menendez had even bragged about smoking and having sex with her “man in Brooklyn” after the sickening hate crime. Sen was cremated on 1 January in the presence of his friends, business partners and a representative of the Indian Consulate in New York. His friends were worried Menendez might beat the murder rap by pleading insanity. “She’s crazy, of course, but well enough to be convicted I hope of this hideous crime. This is heartbreaking, that her racism and “insanity” could have resulted in such a tragedy. Sunando truly is the most innocent victim of a hate crime,” wrote Roger Friedman who knew Sen from the NY Copy Center where he worked. “Sunando Sen was a real person. I knew him the way a lot of New Yorkers know each other. We pass through each others’ lives. What do I remember of him? He was patient, mainly,” Friedman wrote in blogpost on Showbiz411.com. Sen had helped him painstakingly convert old 3D Stereograph slides of his family into prints when no other lab in New York was willing to do it. In the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks in the US, South Asians faced pointed discrimination and turban-wearing Sikhs most notably were caught up in the spiral of hate crimes.