AT 8 A.M. on December 11, 2015, Rosemarie Junor walked through the doors of Medcan, the private medical clinic at York and Adelaide where she worked. As always, her makeup and nail polish were perfectly applied, her dark hair carefully styled. Junor was the youngest of four children born to immigrant parents—her father was Trinidadian, her mother Guyanese—and she was the family’s high achiever. She had started at Medcan in 2011 as a secretary; three years later, she was promoted to co-ordinator of an ultrasound test that screens for early signs of plaque buildup in the carotid artery, the only employee qualified to operate the machine. Junor cared deeply about her work. She had once sacrificed vacation days because she didn’t trust her replacement’s skills.

She had married Baldeo “Lenny” Persaud, a machinist at a Mississauga industrial manufacturing plant, five months earlier in an elaborate wedding featuring a Hindu ceremony for his family, a Catholic ceremony for hers, and a reception for 400 at a banquet hall near Highway 7 and Weston Road. Junor had three outfits—a red sari, a traditional white gown, and another formal dress for the reception, which Persaud had insisted on buying for her despite her protestations that it was too expensive. Junor and Persaud had recently purchased a four-bedroom detached house in Brampton, which they hoped to fill with children. Christmas was two weeks away, and Junor was looking forward to hosting 35 family members for their first Christmas in the new home. A meticulous planner, she had already wrapped the presents, decorated the house and bought the ingredients for a Caribbean-Canadian feast: turkey, garlic ham, curry and rum cake.

It was a slow day at the clinic. Just before noon, a woman came in with a two-month-old baby. Her childcare plans had fallen through. Junor happily volunteered to babysit, then spent the next 20 minutes taking care of the infant while the client met with her doctor. About an hour later, human resources sent out an all-staff email applauding Junor for tending to the baby. She typed out a reply-all thanks on her phone. Then, at 2:35 p.m., she took the elevator down to the Path system and walked a block southeast toward the Shoppers Drug Mart under the TD Bank Tower. As she arrived at the store, she got a phone call from a friend, who announced she’d just accepted a new job. Suddenly, as Junor was walking down an aisle telling her friend how excited she was for her, she was approached and stabbed in the chest with a knife, which pierced her heart. Over the phone, Junor’s friend heard her scream. Junor stumbled toward the pharmacy at the back of the store. “Help me,” she cried out. “I’ve been stabbed.” People flocked to her side. Meanwhile, security tapes show a petite woman in a business suit and lavender dress shirt walking calmly out of the store. A 911 call went out at 2:55 p.m. Paramedics rushed Junor to the hospital. Four days later, after a city-wide manhunt, the police arrested a woman who was well known on Bay Street.

TERROR UNDERGROUND: On December 11, police responded to a call at the Shoppers below the TD Bank Tower. Rosemarie Junor (right) had been stabbed, and a manhunt for Rohinie was soon underway (Image: Path by Daniel Neuhaus)
Rohinie Bisesar came to Toronto from Guyana in 1980, at age five. Her parents, Chandrabhan and Jasmattee, had arrived a few years earlier with their two other children—a boy, Narine, and a girl, Chandrawattee—and had left their youngest, Rohinie, in the care of a relative back in Guyana. Once they’d settled in and scraped together some savings, they bought a three-storey brick house near Woodbine and Danforth, and Rohinie came to join the family shortly thereafter. A second boy, Mahesh, was soon born. In the mid-’80s, the Bisesars opened Sandra’s and Chico’s, a small clothing store on the Danforth a few blocks from their home that’s now sandwiched between a storefront law office and a Chinese restaurant. They were hard-working—both had part-time jobs in addition to running the store—and prioritized education. Their neighbour of 42 years, Francesco Dilorenzo, says they were perfect neighbours: “They’re very good people, beautiful people. A good family, very smart kids, all of them.”

Rohinie attended Monarch Park Collegiate, near Coxwell and Danforth. In her Grade 13 class photo, she’s smiling brightly, her long, wavy hair loose, bangs brushed to the side. In her graduation photo, taken a few months later, she’s cradling a bouquet of red roses, her face beaming, her black gown hanging off her tiny frame. But she is nowhere else in the yearbook—absent from photos of clubs and sports teams, or shots of kids on campus. She apparently had little time for after-school fun. Like her siblings, she was expected to work in the family store in her free time.

According to an ex-boyfriend of Rohinie’s, life at home was tightly controlled, and she grew increasingly resentful of her parents, especially her father, a devout Hindu with a conservative parenting style. The ex, whom I’ll call Geoffrey, agreed to be interviewed on the condition of anonymity. He says Rohinie told him she ran away from home when she was in her early teens. Two days later, a truck driver picked her up and brought her to the police. Some time after that, her father, fed up with her behaviour, took her to a Hindu healer for what he considered a cleansing ritual. Rohinie was made to remove her clothes in front of her father and have chicken blood poured on her.

After graduating from Monarch Park in 1993, Rohinie attended U of T Scarborough, studying sciences, while living at home. In the last year of her degree, she landed an internship at the Consumer Health Organization of Canada, a Toronto-based non-profit that focuses on holistic and alternative health care. She graduated five months later and took a job as a technical writer in York University’s math department, and then another as a computer technician. Trueman MacHenry was a professor of math and statistics at York when he met Rohinie. She impressed him with her curiosity and ability to make herself indispensable.

“She saw what the available jobs were at York, and she immediately trained herself to do them,” says MacHenry. “When she needed to know programming, for example, she learned it, all on her own. She was a very good problem solver.”

For eight years, Rohinie performed various roles at York, including stints as a technical writer, manager of the math department web page and general computing support provider, all while completing her Bachelor of Administrative Studies in 2004 and, in June 2007, her MBA. Throughout, she lived at home, where she felt increasingly suffocated. Her father disapproved of her wearing makeup, despite the fact that she was by this point in her late 20s. According to Geoffrey, Rohinie’s mother had access to her bank account and made regular withdrawals.

At age 28, Rohinie moved out, which shocked her parents, who, according to Geoffrey, believed a woman shouldn’t leave home before marriage. She moved to an apartment near York that she shared with a female roommate, a decision Geoffrey says prompted her father to ask Rohinie if she was a lesbian.

With her MBA and a strong academic record, Rohinie was following closely in the footsteps of her older sister, Chandra, a chartered financial accountant and investment banking executive in New York City. After completing her MBA program in the spring of 2007, Rohinie was hired on a summer contract as a research analyst for Cronus Capital Markets, a now-defunct investment firm, where she created reports and performed research on aspects of the mining industry.

EARLY YEARS: Rohinie attended Monarch Park Collegiate and spent most of her free time working in the family store, Sandra’s and Chico’s, on the Danforth near Main. The Bisesars lived a few blocks away, in a three-storey house on a corner lot near Woodbine and Danforth (Images: House, Store by Daniel Neuhaus)

That fall, Geoffrey was driving with a friend on the York campus and they passed Rohinie on the sidewalk. When the friend catcalled her, she approached and reprimanded him, and Geoffrey joined her in the scolding. Intrigued, she exchanged information with Geoffrey, and they later connected on MSN Messenger. He was five years younger than Rohinie and trying to launch a career in the music business while juggling a handful of industry jobs. He lived at his mother’s house in Brampton. Eventually, after some online courtship, he asked her out. For their first date, they went for Thai food in the west end, then hit the dance club This Is London in the Entertainment District. A few months later, they went out again, and soon they were a couple.

By then, Rohinie had been hired as a research associate at Jennings Capital Inc., an investment firm that later merged with Mackie Research Capital. Her job was to support two analysts. One of them recalls her as a bright and capable MBA grad who initially seemed up to the demands of a cutthroat industry. In the financial world, where the unofficial motto is Work Hard; Work Hard, 100-hour weeks aren’t uncommon, especially at the bottom rungs.

“If you’re an associate,” her former boss told me, “it’s like being an intern. You are responsible for a lot of the grunt work. You’re working long hours, from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. or longer most days. It’s a rite of passage. Everyone goes through it.”

The stress of the job got to Rohinie. She began missing work, and she complained to Geoffrey about one of the analysts aggressively micromanaging her. Her boss saw it differently. “She was emotionally fragile. I think she was overwhelmed by the work and would just not show up. I don’t remember her being there for a full week at a time.” Rohinie worked weekends to try to catch up, but it was too late. Within four months, she was fired.

Still, she had impressed Geoffrey with her focus and drive, and he decided to give up music and pursue business. “She was this outgoing, strong, assertive woman,” he recalls. “She was a Type A personality. She helped to put me on a new path that benefitted me,” he recalls. “I picked one thing I was good at, business, and pushed at it until I excelled.” Geoffrey enrolled in York’s Bachelor of Administrative Studies program, the same commerce degree Rohinie had completed a couple of years earlier, and they moved into a small studio apartment on the York campus.

The plan was for Rohinie to earn enough to support them during Geoffrey’s studies. But the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis had struck, making it a bad time to be looking for a job. Rohinie networked tirelessly, and was hired to prepare a report for a corporate consulting firm called H. Sudan and Co. She finished it in roughly a week. But what Rohinie produced wasn’t what the company wanted. “She was really good technically, putting spreadsheets together,” says her supervisor, “but the insight into what the numbers meant wasn’t there. We parted ways, and that was that.”

Over the next two years, Rohinie continued to apply for jobs, with limited success. But Geoffrey didn’t blame her—few firms were hiring at the time. Plus, he had no reason to doubt her skill set. She had a solid academic record, and his decision to enter business school—on her advice—was working out well. He was in the top five per cent of his class and feeling better about himself than he had in a long time. Rohinie joined the networking associations Women in Capital Markets, the Economic Club of Canada and the Financial Markets Association of Canada, and pushed for coffee dates with the people she met through them. A mentor from those days recalls that Rohinie was persistent, but to no avail.

Rohinie and Geoffrey began to slide into debt. The more dismal the job prospects, however, the more determined Rohinie became. She shunned hobbies and seldom saw the few friends she had. She read the news and pored over financial data, often staying up late into the night.

In April 2010, her tenacity paid off. The mining sector was heating up, and Rohinie found a job as a research associate at GMP Securities, a respected investment firm at King and York that specializes in commodities and mining stocks. She was one of four associates working under a mining analyst. Rohinie wanted to move downtown so she wouldn’t have to commute from York. Though Geoffrey was only halfway through his degree, she was the main breadwinner, and he agreed. A month after she started at GMP, they moved into a 450-square-foot apartment at Yonge and King.

She woke daily at 5 a.m., showered, made a cup of instant coffee, then blow-dried her hair straight and applied makeup. At 6 a.m. Geoffrey would wake and walk her to work through the Path. It was their time together. She’d start work at 6:30 a.m. and often return home after 10 p.m. They lived frugally, splurging at most once a month on a date night—usually burgers at Moxie’s. Rohinie didn’t like to go clubbing or to parties, and she spent almost nothing on material goods. “The clothes she wore at home looked like they were hand-me-downs from the 1980s,” says Geoffrey. Her favourite pants to wear at home were faded green pyjama bottoms with monkey faces on them.

Despite her long hours, Rohinie struggled at GMP. Geoffrey recalls her complaining about the three colleagues who shared her office, saying they acted “like immature cowboys” and distracted her with their loud conversations. As a research associate, she was doing similar work to her job at Jennings, effectively at the bottom of the GMP food chain. Yet a former co-worker says she once criticized her direct superior’s job performance in front of her colleagues. “She implied that she could have done better than him, though she wasn’t very good at her job,” says the co-worker. “She was junior. She was stubborn. She wouldn’t take guidance or advice from anybody. And she was ambitious. I think she wanted her analyst’s job. I think that’s why she was so critical of him.”

Rohinie became suspicious of her colleagues. At home, she complained to Geoffrey that she’d been asked to sign documents for insurance coverage related to a work trip, but her employer hadn’t given her adequate time to read them. She told Geoffrey that her colleagues were plotting against her, and the couple went shopping online for a key chain spy camera so she could keep tabs on her computer and other belongings when she was away from her desk. Geoffrey thought her suspicions were odd, but Rohinie eventually dropped the idea, and they soon forgot about it.

 

Edited April 20, 20169 yr by arjun

இந்த கட்டுரையில் எழுதப்பட்டுள்ள ரோகினி என்னுடைய பல்கலைகழக நாட்களில் எனக்கும் நன்கு பரீட்சயமானவர். மிகவும் அழகான பெண். எப்போதும் ஆழ்ந்த சிந்தனையில் இருப்பதை போலவே காணப்படுவார். ஆடை, அணிகலன்களில் பெரிதாக நாட்டம் இல்லாதவர் போல மிகவும் எளிமையான விதத்தில் தான் இவர் ஆடைகள் அணிவார். 
கணித துறையில் புலி. என்னோடு இரண்டு கணித பாடங்கள் எடுத்திருந்தார் என்ற ஞாபகம். (Linear Algebra, Discrete math)
நான் கூட சில பரீட்சை காலங்களில் அவரிடம் சந்தேகங்கள் கேட்டு படித்துள்ளேன், தவிர நான் யோர்க் பல்கலை கழகத்தில் வேலை செய்த நாட்களில், இவரும் நானும் ஒரே கட்டிட தொகுதியில் தான் வேலை செய்தோம். அடிக்கடி சிந்திப்போம். 
இந்த ரோகினியையே டாவடிப்பமா என்று யோசித்த பல தருணங்களும் உண்டு. காரணம் இவரது மிகவும் அமைதியான போக்கும், இவரின் அழகான சிரிப்பும் தான், (மெலிவான குள்ளமான உடல் வாகு கொண்டதாகவும் இருக்கலாம் )

வாழ்க்கை ஓட்டத்தில் காலச்சுவடு எப்படியெல்லாம், எங்கெல்லாம்  ஒருவனை / ஒருவளை கொண்டு செல்கிறது என்பது மிகவும் விந்தையான ஒரு விடயம்.
ரோகினி பலராலும் மிகவும் மதிப்போடு பார்க்கப்பட்ட ஒரு மாணவி !!!

இறைவன் அவருக்கு நல்வழியை காட்டட்டும்.