BURLINGTON — As a long-awaited murder trial got underway Friday in Chittenden County Superior criminal court, jurors quickly learned how lawyers on both sides plan to argue the case.
As prosecutors tell it, Aita Gurung was a man with a history of assaulting his wife -– a history that culminated in an attack five years ago in which he killed her with a meat cleaver and nearly killed his mother-in-law as she came to her daughter’s aid.
Gurung’s defense argues that he was insane at the time, having been released from a Burlington hospital where he had been receiving psychiatric care only an hour and half before the attacks.
Gurung, 39, is charged with first-degree murder in the slaying of his 32-year-old wife, Yogeswari Khadka, at their home in Burlington’s Old North End, according to charging documents. He also faces a charge of attempted murder, accused of seriously injuring his mother-in-law, Thulsa Rimal, 54.
The trial, which is expected to last a month, is unlikely to play out as a whodunnit, but instead to focus on Gurung’s state of mind on Oct. 12, 2017.
“The state will show evidence to demonstrate that at its core this case is domestic violence and Yogeswari was killed as she did not do what (the) defendant demanded of her,” Assistant Attorney General Rose Kennedy told the jury in her opening statement.
Sandra Lee, an attorney representing Gurung, said that the evidence would show that Gurung was insane at the time of the alleged crimes and had been seeking help in the past, only to have been released from the hospital on the day of the attacks.
“When you’ve heard all the evidence from all the different doctors and all the different people,” Lee told the jurors, it will show that Gurung was insane — and therefore not criminally responsible — at the time.
5 years to trial, 4 days to pick jury
Jury selection in the case started Monday and concluded Thursday, setting the stage for the opening arguments. A panel of 12 jurors will hear the case, along with six alternates.
Jurors were questioned on their thoughts and opinions on a variety of topics that may be raised in the trial, including domestic violence and the use of the insanity defense. Jurors were also told that graphic images and video were expected to be shown during the trial.
One of the bigger stumbling blocks in seating the jury was the fact that the trial was expected to last up to a month, finishing in the first week of November. Many jurors had conflicts or could not step away from other commitments for that period of time, due to work or family obligations.
The opening statements Friday came just a few days shy of exactly five years since the attacks. The long legal road leading to the trial included one prosecutor dropping the charges against Gurung, only to have another prosecutor refile them.
Gurung’s case was among three murder or attempted murder cases that Chittenden County State’s Attorney Sarah George dismissed in 2019, setting off a political firestorm.
George said she based those decisions on expert opinions about the defendants, concluding that her office could not rebut insanity defenses raised in each instance.
Gov. Phil Scott took exception to George’s office dropping the charges and called on then-Vermont Attorney General TJ Donovan to conduct a separate review.
Donovan performed that review and opted to bring the murder charge against Gurung two months later, in September 2019. In doing so, he made the unusual move of stepping into a case after it had been dismissed by a county prosecutor. He also brought charges in the other two dismissed cases.
‘He hears these voices’
In court Friday, the jurors got a glimpse of what to expect in the weeks ahead, including graphic details.
“The evidence in this case will show that on Oct. 12, 2017, Yogeswari Khadka was attacked brutally by her husband, the defendant, (when) she did not get him a beer and when she dared to speak to him in a loud voice,” Kennedy, the prosecutor, told the jurors.
“The evidence will show that the defendant picked up a metal cleaver and repeatedly and brutally struck Yogeswari about the head and body,” Kennedy added. “Thulsa Rimal, Yogeswari’s mother, was nearly killed when she desperately attempted to save her daughter’s life and threw her body between that of the defendant’s blade and Yogeswari’s body.”
Gurung and Khadka met in a refugee resettlement camp in Nepal when they were children, Kennedy said, and spent more than two decades there before eventually immigrating to the United States and Burlington in 2015.
Khadka appeared to be thriving in her new environment, according to Kennedy, while Gurung was not. She made friends, worked nearly every day, was learning to drive and was looking to buy a vehicle, the prosecutor said.
Gurung, Kennedy said, was not working and had started to drink on a regular basis. Khadka’s parents moved in with her and Gurung in 2017, she added.
Kennedy said family members would speak to the physical abuse that Khadka suffered, with witnesses expected to testify about instances in which she was allegedly strangled by her husband.
Lee, Gurung’s lawyer, told jurors that they would learn during the trial that her client was at the University of Vermont Medical Center receiving care for five days leading up to the attacks because “he knew his mind was not working,” and he was not able to communicate clearly because of his “severe psychotic disorder.”
Gurung was admitted to the hospital, Lee added, reporting that he had been hearing voices for the past several months, with the voices often telling him to do things.
“He hears these voices most of the day, including at nighttime, which makes it difficult to sleep,” Lee said. “They had made it difficult for him to get a job.”
On the day in question, Lee said, Gurung wanted to be released from the medical center. A doctor sat down with Gurung and his wife, the defense attorney told the jury, and asked them if they believed Gurung was a harm to himself or others.
“Both of them denied any concerns,” Lee said of Gurung and Khadka.
Lee said jurors would hear from forensic psychiatrists who would testify that Gurung was insane at the time of the alleged crimes. Those experts, Lee told jurors, would testify that Gurung was “suffering acutely from psychotic symptoms, auditory hallucinations — voices that were telling him, demanding him, to hit his wife, hit his wife, kill her, kill her, do not leave her, finish her.”
Kennedy, the prosecutor, told jurors that video of a portion of the attack would be played for the jurors, and she advised them to pay close attention to how Gurung acted with purpose, telling his wife at one point, “You betrayed me.”
“While the state agrees that the defendant had mental illness on the day of the killing,” the prosecutor added, “the evidence will show that the defendant purposely and knowingly killed his wife and attempted to kill his mother-in-law.”
Nepali interpreters are translating the proceedings for Gurung, who sat quietly in court Friday with headphones on, listening to the first day of the trial.
