Testimony: Accused wife-killer juggled two girlfriends

In the five months before Kashif Parvaiz allegedly persuaded one girlfriend to murder his wife in Boonton, he vacationed in Jamaica and Atlantic City with a second lover who believed she and Parvaiz were engaged, according to trial testimony Wednesday.

Antionette Stephen, a 30-year-old Massachusetts woman who claims her lover Parvaiz convinced her his wife, Nazish Noorani, needed to die for the sake of their children, completed her testimony Wednesday before a Morris County jury.

Stephen has admitted shooting Noorani, the 27-year-old mother of two young sons, on Cedar Street in Boonton on Aug. 16, 2011, and made a veiled reference Wednesday to potential harm by Parvaiz that resulted in a defense lawyer’s unsuccessful request for a mistrial.

In trying to unravel Stephen’s story that Parvaiz masterminded a plan to kill his wife but had her carry it out, defense attorney John Latoracca sometimes yelled at Stephen to answer questions with a yes or no, and suggested she was fabricating ludicrous details. Stephen, who has a bachelor’s degree in architecture and was working at Best Buy and Kohl’s in Boston to further her education, raised her voice in response and at one point said of Parvaiz: “When I oppose him...it’s not something you want to see on a regular basis.”

Interrupting Stephen, Latoracca asked Superior Court Judge Robert Gilson to strike the comment and then asked for a sidebar. The jury was excused and Latoracca asked for a mistrial on grounds that Stephen, though not permitted to allude to any alleged domestic violence by Parvaiz during their relationship, was deliberately trying to create an impression with jurors that she was afraid of him.

Morris County Assistant Prosecutor Matthew Troiano opposed the motion for a mistrial and the judge ruled against it, concluding that Stephen’s one comment “didn’t go far enough” to create undue prejudice against Parvaiz.

As the state’s chief witness, Stephen on Tuesday had told jurors that she met Parvaiz, now 29, at a college in Boston in January 2011 and they became lovers after a few months. She said Parvaiz told her he was divorced under Muslim law from Noorani, and that Noorani was money-grubbing, selfish and indifferent to their two sons to the point of ignoring one son’s purported need for blood transfusions to treat his sickle cell anemia. Authorities said the boy was not ill.

On cross-examination Wednesday, Stephen stuck to her story of Parvaiz persuading her to help him in a murder plot. She said he bought the guns -- 9mm and .38-caliber handguns -- and instructed her how to dress for the crime and provided a hand-drawn map of Boonton, where Stephen shot Noorani to death and wounded Parvaiz with four shots. The wounding of Parvaiz, she said, was part of the scheme to make the crime look like Parvaiz was the main target of a robbery gone bad.

Noorani and her sons were living at Parvaiz’s parents’ home in Brooklyn and he was living in Boston, supposedly to attend Harvard University. The couple got together in August 2011 to break the fast of the Ramadan holiday with relatives in Boonton.

Stephen said that Parvaiz had told her to shoot his wife to death and then shoot him in specific parts of his body. When she indicated for the jury that Parvaiz allegedly said to shoot him in the shoulder and stomach, Latoracca reacted with incredulity: “He wanted you to shoot him three inches from his heart?” He picked apart details of the alleged conspiracy, and Stephen retorted at one point: “It was his plan.”

She insisted that she was panicked after the shooting, and Parvaiz was yelling for help on the street, so she forgot to grab jewelry, money and cell phones at the scene.

The jury also heard of a complicated personal life that Parvaiz was juggling. Around the same time that he married Noorani, he met Yelena Belorusets in 2005 at a chemistry lecture in Brooklyn.

According to testimony Wednesday from Belorusets, she said that she and Parvaiz became romantic and he asked her to marry him in April 2010. Belorusets said she believed Parvaiz was divorced under both Muslim and American law. She said he never spoke of harming Noorani but had mentioned he hoped she would become mired in immigration problems while on vacation in her native Pakistan and not be able to return to the United States.

While still married to Noorani and dating Belorusets, Parvaiz met Stephen in January 2010. Both Belorusets and Stephen said they had met the victim and been introduced to her as a friend of Parvaiz. Stephen said she even stayed overnight with Noorani when the woman came to Boston to visit Parvaiz but he had to go on a business trip.

“It was casual, friendly. There was no animosity,” Stephen said of her relationship with the woman she wound up shooting.

Jurors heard that while Parvaiz was planning the murder, allegedly, with Stephen, he went on two vacations with Belorusets -- to Jamaica in April 2011 and to Atlantic City in July 2011. Belorusets told jurors that she broke her foot while vacationing with Parvaiz in Jamaica and that he spent a few weeks with her at her housing unit at the State University of New York at Stony Brook while she recovered.

Co-defense counsel John Bruno reminded Belorusets that she told authorities after the killing that she never believed Parvaiz would hurt his wife.

“You never thought he could hurt her in any way, just wanted distance from her?” Bruno asked. Belorusets replied yes.

The trial continues Thursday in Morristown. Assistant prosecutors are expected to call a woman who Parvaiz allegedly asked for poison, and detectives who unearthed emails from his computer that show he was soliciting help from black magic artists to help his wife disappear or have an accident.

Staff Writer Peggy Wright: 973-267-1142; pwright@njpressmedia.com