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A 12-member jury found 31-year-old Jitesh Bhogal guilty of first-degree murder in the sexual assault and murder of Autumn Taggart at her home in West Windsor on June 10, 2018.
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Taggart, 31, was a complete stranger to Bhogal, who was 27 at the time and a design engineer for General Motors in Michigan. It was a completely random encounter on a night when Bhogal was in Windsor looking for cocaine. Taggart, a mother of one, lived in an apartment building next to a crack house where a local drug dealer had promised to buy cocaine.
In a trial that began in October, the defense argued that he was innocent of murder due to a “cocaine-induced psychosis” and his inability to think clearly.
In closing arguments before Superior Court Judge Renee Pomerance’s final instructions to the jury on Monday, defense attorney Peter Thorning urged jurors to find his client innocent of the murder charge. “Sir. Bhogal is guilty of murder, no more, no less.”
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Thorning said evidence presented during the trial showed that his client was “extremely intoxicated” or suffering from psychosis when he “scaled the wall” outside Taggart’s West Windsor apartment building, entered his unit and then confronted the occupant. In his bedroom. Bhogal, he said, had mistaken her for a drug addict who had just ripped him off in the parking lot outside.
“I was very wrong,” Thorning said of his client. When Taggart screamed, he kept his mouth shut. His death was “accidental,” Bhogal himself declared earlier during the trial.
“Do not believe Mr. Bhogal’s evidence,” said Deputy Crown Prosecutor Kim Bertholet during the prosecution’s closing arguments.
The testimony of the only other person in the bedroom at the time, Bertholet said, was “inherently contradictory,” selfish, “and ultimately unbelievable.”
Contrary to Bhogal’s explanation, Bertholet said the engineer was “determined, angry” and acted with purpose and intention in the early hours of June 10, 2018.
More to come.
Reference-windsorstar.com