CALGARY – A Calgary landlord stabbed while trying to stop the murders of two women in Penbrooke Meadows earlier this month is breaking her silence for the first time.
The victim, who doesn’t wish to be identified, says she tried to intervene when Sanjula Devi and Fahmida Velji-Visram were attacked on May 4th.
Both Sanjula, 36, and Fahmida, 29, died after being stabbed in a home in the 6400 block of Penbrooke Drive.
Sanjula was visiting the basement suite she once shared with her now-estranged husband to collect some of her belongings, and had brought along her young daughter and her close friend Fahmida to help her.
The landlord says she knew something was wrong when she heard screaming coming from the basement.
The 44-year-old rushed into the basement suite, hoping to save the 10-year-old girl inside.
“As soon as the door was open, I pulled the hand of the little girl. I swing her behind me and I tell her, ‘you run upstairs,’” explains the landlord.
She says she then wrestled with a man with a big knife who had already stabbed Sanjula and Fahmida.
“I kept pulling him till we came in the hallway, and that’s the time he stabbed me,” she explains.
Although bleeding from her stab wound, the landlord managed to call 911.
She needed 10 stitches for her shoulder, but still expresses sadness she couldn’t save the other women.
“I wish I could have done little bit more, so that those two people would have been saved as well,” she says.
“When I sleep in the nighttime, all I can hear is their screaming. When I close my eyes, all I can see is the big knife.”
Two charges of second-degree murder and one count of aggravated assault are pending against Sanjula’s estranged husband Hari Pal.
He remains in hospital with self-inflicted injuries.
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