After seven years of legal drama that led to Connecticut’s highest court twice, a Marietta man was sentenced to 32 years in prison Friday for killing a Yale University doctor he claims had him unfairly fired years earlier.
Lishan Wang, 51, opened fire on Dr. Vajindeer Toor and his pregnant wife outside their home in a New Haven suburb in 2010. The husband was killed, but the wife, Parneeta Sidhu, was unharmed.
In 2008, Toor worked at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in New York City, where he and other doctors had confrontations with Wang that led to Wang's firing, according to The Associated Press. Wang said the unfair firing destroyed his medical career and that Toor was to blame for the shooting.
Wang represented himself in the case until 2015 when a judge ruled him incompetent to do so and assigned a public defender.
Wang had been facing murder charges, but New Haven’s head public defender Thomas Ullmann negotiated lesser charges of manslaughter, attempted assault and other gun crimes.
Ullmann told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Monday that Wang had moved to Marietta with his wife and family sometime after the 2008 firing.
He said Wang’s wife told police her husband “left the house and never returned one day.”
According to authorities, Wang drove the nearly 1,000 miles from Marietta to the New Haven area to kill Toor, who was working with the infectious-disease department of Yale-New Haven Hospital.
The Hartford Courant reported that Wang stared straight ahead and showed no emotion in the courtroom Friday.
“My husband was bleeding and I was frantically trying to save him, still hoping he would be OK,” Sidhu told the court, according to the newspaper. “I sat down and placed my husband's head on my lap and held him in my arms as he breathed his last breath in my arms in front of our 3-year-old son.”
Wang was arrested the same day of the shooting.
The Courant said police found in Wang’s van a photo of Toor and the man’s family along with documents that referred to two other people involved in Wang’s firing, about a thousand rounds of ammunition, a wig, a hammer and a knife.
The case took seven years to resolve because it brought forward many legal pecularities.
The first trip to the state Supreme Court was over who pays for legal expenses if a prisoner represents himself, which Wang did, the Courant reported. The second was whether a judge can order for a prisoner to be forcibly medicated in order to make them competent to stand trial.
Wang has been under a judge’s order to be forcibly medicated against his will to treat his mental illness.
His attorneys said Wang has delusional disorder and paranoia.
On Friday, Judge Patrick J. Clifford disagreed with Wang when he compared his loss with that of Toor’s family, according to the newspaper.
“The hell that this family has gone through and why? Because you’re a revengeful and disturbed person,” Clifford said.
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