Wife testifies against husband accused in mom's death

Harpal Hira did not heed his wife when she asked him to leave their twins' birthday celebration in August 2008, she testified Tuesday. Instead he asked her to repeat herself, and began cleaning a kitchen knife, she said.

PHOTOS: Harpal Hira arrest and trial

Then, "he tried to stab me," Ritika Hira, 25, said during testimony. "I tried to grab the phone, but he snatched it, and threw it on the floor."

Ritika Hira's often emotional testimony at her estranged husband's murder trial came despite her resistance to appearing on the stand. Prosecutors had to issue a "material witness order," compelling her to do so, according to court testimony. Harpal Hira, who was in the courtroom, is charged with trying to kill Ritika Hira and killing his mother-in-law.

Ritika Hira refused to look at her husband when prosecutor Martin Meaney asked her to identify him in the courtroom. Several times as she testified, she held her hands to her face and said, "I can't do this."

At one point she broke down sobbing, and the judge sent the jury out of the courtroom.

Ritika Hira told the jury that her husband moved out of their home in June 2008, after she got a restraining order against him.

But she said she allowed him to return to their Hicksville home periodically to see their twin sons. On the night of the killing, Ritika Hira said her husband had come over to celebrate the three-month anniversary of the twins' birth with her, her sister, and her mother. But she asked him to leave when she realized he had been drinking, she said.

"By the time my mother came downstairs, he had pushed me against the refrigerator and tried to stab me in the head," she said. "When she tried to take him off me, he turned around and stabbed her."

Hira's defense lawyer, Michael Dergarabedian of Rockville Centre, hammered Ritika Hira for hours on the stand, picking apart inconsistencies in her statements and questioning her decision to send her 9-month old babies to live with their father's brother in India, and to leave them there now, more than a year later.

Dergarabedian pointed out that Ritika Hira told police after the crime that her sister was upstairs when her husband became violent. On the stand, she said her sister had been downstairs. After the crime she told police her husband stabbed her in the stomach. On the stand, she said she was never stabbed in the stomach.

"I was under drugs," she said of the time she made her initial statement to police while she was in the hospital being treated for her stab wounds. "I didn't know that every word was so important."