BROAD CHANNEL, Queens (WABC) — The pain is palpable from thousands of miles away. Paula Sequea spoke with Eyewitness News exclusively from Trinidad about her daughter, Salisha Ali, 33. More of Ali’s body parts turned up in Queens last week.
“I don’t even know how to feel – I don’t have feeling anymore. I can’t feel happy, I can’t feel sad. All of my feelings just locked off. I have no feelings,” said the victim’s mother, Paula Sequea.
Ms. Sequea has been at a loss for months now, but she certainly felt something aboug her daughter’s relationship with a 75-year-old man she first met while he was visiting Trinidad in 2022 and later married.
“Well I had not approved of it because of the age difference, because I told her he could be your grandfather. And she told me it’s not a marriage like that – he is trying to help me and the kids,” she said.
Ali eventually moved to the United States to live with Rupchand Simboo in Queens on the promise of a better life. It wouldn’t take long for there to be trouble in paradise.
“He was like more controlling trying to control her- don’t go here, don’t go there- he’d tell her don’t go to work you can stay home. And she was telling him I did not come here to be a house wife, I came here to work and establish myself,” her mother said.
Ms. Sequea stopped hearing from her daughter last July. It wasn’t until September that her daughter’s beheaded torso was found by sanitation workers. In the interim, Ali’s husband told the family she moved out and was cutting everyone off.
“He was misleading us real bad,” said Ms. Sequea.
Sequea said she believed everything he was saying until the detectives called her on October 23 and asked if she could identify some tattoos.
“And when I saw the tattoos with her three daughters’ names, then I knew she died,” she said.
Ali’s decomposed head, legs and arm were discovered in the Jamaica Wildlife Refuge last week. Investigators would find the same plastic wrap and rope used to bind the victim’s torso in her husband’s home.
Using cellphone data, detectives also found Simboo had been to the locations where Ali’s remains turned up. The 75-year-old was charged this week with killing and dismembering his wife.
“When I heard it, I broke down and cried because I was so relieved that he was finally going to pay for what he did,” Sequea adds
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