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  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Pooroushasb “Peter” Parineh Sentenced in 2010 CA Slaying of Parima Parineh



    The three grown children of a Woodside man charged with murdering his wife for insurance money believe she survived for some period of time after he “willfully and maliciously” shot her twice in the head, according to a wrongful death suit filed on their behalf.

    The suit filed April 11 in San Mateo County Superior Court against Pooroushasb “Peter” Parineh, came just shy of the anniversary of the April 13, 2010 death of his wife, Parima. The children — sons Austiag Hormoz Parineh and Khashayar Parineh and daughter Austiaj Parineh — are seeking damages for their mother’s death, her property which they say was destroyed and funeral expenses. The suit also requests punitive damages to punish Parineh and argue they’ve been damaged by the death through the loss of their mother’s love and comfort.

    The Parineh children’s attorneys said they do not comment on pending litigation.

    Parineh, 66, is set to stand trial Oct. 1 and potentially faces the death penalty or life in prison without parole if convicted of first-degree murder and the special allegation of murder for financial gain. He has pleaded not guilty and a decision on the death penalty has yet to be made, said District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe.

    Parima Parineh, 56, was shot twice in the head in the bedroom of the couple’s multi-million dollar home on Fox Hill Road in Woodside. At a preliminary hearing last fall, the prosecution argued Parineh stood to benefit from a $31 million life insurance policy and, outside court, said he also had a longtime mistress.

    Parineh allegedly gave authorities differing stories; once, he said he found his wife dead and another time, that he found her wounded and finished the job at her request. Criminalists said none of the four shots could have been self-inflicted. The gun was the only weapon of Parineh’s not confiscated earlier by law enforcement after his wife allegedly tried to commit suicide.

    At the time of his wife’s death, Parineh was $13 million to $14 million in debt and his life of foreclosures included the Fox Hill home and several properties scattered throughout the state, including Byron, Hayward, Sunnyvale and Dixon. His wife had a number of life insurance policies totaling $31 million but they had a lien against them and were about to end without payment.

    Authorities arrested Parineh June 17, 2010 in Sunnyvale and he has been held since without bail.

    Shortly after Parineh’s arrest, the District Attorney’s Office said the children were not being cooperative with the investigation but later said they provided statements. According to the civil suit, the children believe Parineh shot their mother, that she “survived the attack for some period of time before dying as a result” and that his purpose was to benefit financially from certain life insurance payouts.

    Parima Parineh was raised in Tehran, Iran and moved to the United States when she was 22. She was an artist working in multiple media.

    http://www.smdailyjournal.com/articl...title=Children sue dad for their mom’s death


    Woodside death now a homicide
    Apr 20, 2010 ... The victim has been identified as Parima Parineh who lived at the residence with her husband, Pooroushasb (Peter) Parineh, and two adult ...
    http://www.smdailyjournal.com/articl...d=129503&title...






    Husband arrested for wife’s Woodside murder
    Jun 18, 2010 ... PooroushasbPeterParineh was arrested at approximately 3 p.m. Thursday, June 17 for the murder of his wife, Parima Parineh. Parineh ...
    smdailyjournal.com/article_preview.php?id=133966&title...


    Another delay in Woodside wife killing case
    Jan 6, 2011 ... PooroushasbPeterParineh, 65, was scheduled to pick a preliminary hearing date yesterday. Instead, his defense team asked for more time ...
    http://www.smdailyjournal.com/articl...d=149797&title...


    Woodside man pleads not guilty to killing wife
    Nov 3, 2011 ... Pooroushasb Parineh, known as Peter, is charged with first-degree murder, the use of a gun and the special allegation of murder for financial ...
    http://www.smdailyjournal.com/articl....php?id=221760
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  2. #2
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Woodside Man Accused of Murdering Wife Takes Stand

    A Woodside man who is on trial for allegedly murdering his wife to cash in on $30 million worth of insurance money admitted he faced financial ruin in the days before her death.

    Pooroushash "Peter" Parineh, 67, took the witness stand today in his own defense in San Mateo County Superior Court.

    Wearing a dark gray suit and blue tie, Parineh said his real estate holdings before 2007 were worth an estimated $150 million, but by early 2010, they had plummeted in value and were worth only a few million dollars.

    Five properties -- including the family home in an exclusive neighborhood in Woodside -- were in foreclosure, Parineh said.

    "I never thought that the real estate market was going to crash," he said.

    Parineh had borrowed more than $650,000 in short-term emergency loans from friends, which he had no immediate way to pay back, he said. A bank that had underwritten more than $30 million worth of life insurance policies in his wife Parima's name was threatening to recall the cash and
    nullify them at any moment, Parineh said.

    "No other bank was going to refinance those loans, right?" Deputy District Attorney Jeff Finigan asked.

    "No," Parineh said. "I was waiting for everything to work out."

    Finigan asked Parineh if he had any other potential source of income in April 2010 besides getting his wife's insurance money or face bankruptcy at age 65.

    "No," he said.

    Parineh said his wife shot herself in the head April 13, 2010. The defendant said he returned home from the gym late in the afternoon and discovered her body in the master bedroom of their Woodside mansion.

    There were two bullet wounds in her head.

    "I saw her blood," Parineh said, fighting back tears. "I touched her forehead."

    Prosecutors argue that neither gunshot could have been self-inflicted, that both would have been fatal and that Parineh made the death look like suicide to benefit from the victim's insurance policies.

    Defense Attorney Dek Ketchum argued that Parima suffered from depression in the months leading up to her death, and that she killed herself to save her family.

    "Do you feel you had a role in your wife's suicide?" Kechum asked.

    "What do you think? Yes," Parineh said.

    Parineh could face the death penalty or life in prison if convicted.

    http://redwoodcity-woodside.patch.co...fe-takes-stand
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  3. #3
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    Suicide or murder? Attorneys duel in closing arguments

    Did Parima Parineh commit suicide in the bedroom of her Woodside home on April 13, 2010, or was she shot and killed by her husband, Pooroushasb "Peter" Parineh, who is charged with premeditated murder for financial gain?

    That was the key point of contention Friday in San Mateo County Superior Court in Redwood City as a prosecutor and a defense attorney gave their closing arguments to the jury.

    Could Ms. Parineh, 56, have killed herself while lying in her bed by shooting herself in the head with a 0.38-caliber handgun and then, failing to die, take two more shots -- one that missed and one that may have delivered a grazing wound to her head -- and then take a fourth shot that ended her life?

    "Just pull yourself back to common sense and look at the totality of the evidence," Deputy District Attorney Jeff Finigan told the jury. "Is this the most extreme, superhuman suicide ever? No. This is murder plain and simple."

    "It was a suicide gone horribly wrong by a woman not familiar with the gun," defense attorney Dek Ketchum said in his summation. "She shot herself, she struggled, she missed and then she killed herself."

    Mr. Parineh, a 67-year-old commercial real estate investor, had seen his net worth melt away after the 2007 collapse of the real estate bubble. He was arrested in June 2010 and has been in county jail ever since on a no-bail status.

    The 15 members of the jury panel -- 12 jurors and three alternates, all of mixed age, race and gender -- sat in Courtroom 2C for 15 days of testimony that included a recording of an anguished 911 call, a video taken at a firing range showing the handgun's recoil, a bed and mattress brought in to reconstruct the scene of Ms. Parineh's death, and many photos, some grisly and revisited more than once. Members of the Parineh family in the front row of audience seats would look away when the photos were shown.

    Superior Court Judge Lisa A. Novak said she will give the jury its deliberation instructions on Monday (May 20). If the jury reaches a unanimous guilty verdict, Mr. Parineh faces life in prison or the death penalty.

    Insurance worries
    The couple and one or two of their three adult children had been living in a mansion on Fox Hill Drive in unincorporated Woodside, where Ms. Parineh had been a homemaker and painter. In March 2007, Mr. Parineh's holdings had been valued at $152 million, Mr. Finigan said. By August 2009, he had been reduced to borrowing $655,000; two months later he had stopped paying two mortgages. In January 2010, Mr. Parineh lost his Los Altos office building and all his income and had applied for government assistance, Mr. Finigan said. The family was contemplating life in an apartment.

    Using Mr. Parineh's email correspondence with his insurance contacts, Mr. Finigan portrayed him as desperately trying to avoid the cancellation of his wife's policy. Mr. Finigan noted several times how Mr. Parineh's promises to bring his payments up to date lined up closely with two significant incidents: when his wife overdosed in an attempted suicide on March 16, 2010, and when she died, on April 13, 2010.

    Both sides agreed that on the day after his wife's death, Mr. Parineh did talk with his life insurance agent. But to what end?

    "It's not unreasonable to ask what you're going to get," Mr. Ketchum said. "They clearly had a relationship. He's calling because they had business, they were friends." There is reasonable doubt as to what his motives were, Mr. Ketchum told the jury.

    "What this case is about is greed, plain and simple. It's greed," Mr. Finigan said. With his wife's life insured for $26.5 million, Mr. Parineh saw that policy "as the only way to save his lifestyle."

    Referring to sometimes harsh email messages from Mr. Parineh to his children, Mr. Finigan pointed to incriminating passages. "I am in more s--- than I can handle," Mr. Parineh says in one, adding that their mother's insurance "can save us" and "save the financial empire that I have built." Mr. Finigan added: "The way he's talking about that insurance, he views it as an asset."

    Of the $655,000 Mr. Parineh borrowed, Mr. Finigan noted, $300,000 of it went to maintain collateral on the insurance policy, money he could have used on mortgage payments. "That makes no sense unless you think that money may be coming to you in the future," Mr. Finigan said.

    The policy had been placed in a trust managed by the couple's three adult children, with whom Mr. Parineh did not get along. (In April 2012, his two sons, Austiag Hormoz Parineh and Khashayar Parineh, and his daughter, Austiaj Parineh, filed a wrongful death lawsuit against their father.)

    "He may not be father of the year," Mr. Ketchum said, "but when it comes to business, he can figure things out." It's absurd, he said, to think, given the children's control of the trust, that Mr. Parineh would anticipate rapid payouts that typically take weeks or months.

    Wife depressed
    Ms. Parineh was being treated for depression, and according to Mr. Ketchum, was shouldering many of the day-to-day tasks: opening mail and taking phone calls from creditors, sometimes at 6 a.m.

    Suicide had come up. Mr. Parineh had investigated whether the insurance policies covered it, and the couple had a suicide pact between them, Mr. Finigan said.

    When Ms. Parineh overdosed at home in March 2010, Mr. Parineh mentioned the pact to his daughter, Mr. Finigan said. As emergency workers tried to resuscitate her, her husband reportedly showed no emotion. When she regained consciousness in the hospital, one of her first questions was the status of her husband, Mr. Finigan said. After that she was upbeat, not suicidal, he said.

    Returning to his theme of reasonable doubt, Mr. Ketchum asserted that the children's testimony lacked credibility as to their assessment of their mother's mental health. Likewise regarding their suspicions of their father and their recollections of conversations with him, Mr. Ketchum said.

    On the morning of her last day, Ms. Parineh admonished her children to dress nicely, telling her son to always make his bed, then showing him how. "Why that morning?" Mr. Ketchum asked. "Why 'Always make your bed?'"

    If Mr. Parineh loved his wife, Mr. Finigan asked, and if she had talked of killing herself to help the family out of its financial difficulties, why didn't he cancel the policies after her suicide attempt "instead of hanging on to them like a dog with a bone?" Why did he give her a gun?

    Mr. Parineh did not attend his wife's memorial service, Mr. Finigan added.

    His absence "isn't about disrespecting his wife," Mr. Ketchum countered in his summation. "This is about being in a hostile environment where you're grieving." The deputies at the scene of her death described his grieving as genuine, he said.

    Mr. Finigan, in examining Mr. Parineh's phone records, noted frequent conversations with an ex-mistress from the 1990s, and that he was staying in a motel with this woman, at her expense, in the days after Ms. Parineh's death.

    Mr. Ketchum had an explanation. Mr. Parineh's life was "falling apart" and he was estranged from his children. "He doesn't have any friends," he said. "If you assume that people need to talk sometimes, she serves that purpose."

    Staging a suicide?
    Mr. Parineh was at home on the day of his wife's death until 12:27 p.m., Mr. Finigan told jurors. Reviewing the defendant's typically voluminous daily phone record, Mr. Finigan observed that in a departure from routine, a series of calls went to voicemail between 10:38 and 11:27 a.m. "This is a guy who's tethered to his phone," Mr. Finigan said, "but not on this day. What was he doing during that time? He was murdering his wife and cleaning up."

    When authorities responded to Mr. Parineh's anguished late-afternoon 911 call upon his discovery of the bloody scene in the couple's bedroom, they took close-up photographs of his (Parineh's) hands, photos that Mr. Finigan displayed for the jury. "These are not the hands of someone who has just come home, and (who) loved his wife. They're immaculate," Mr. Finigan said. "There was blood all over Ms. Parineh." The condition of his hands is "entirely inconsistent" with the intensity of his 911 call, Mr. Finigan added.

    Mr. Parineh's hands were "beautifully manicured," Mr. Ketchum said in a rejoinder to the prosecution's photos. "He's not the kind of guy who likes to get his hands dirty."

    Gunshot residue (GSR), the cloud of microscopic particles a gun ejects when being fired, was found on Mr. Parineh's left hand, shirt, vest, T-shirt and trousers. How did it get there? The prosecution claimed that it happened when Mr. Parineh shot his wife. The defense said it was acquired by storing the clothes in a bag that had carried a gun to a firing range. Mr. Finigan rejected that claim, based on videos that included shots of Mr. Parineh carrying a particular bag to the gym.

    "There is something important about GSR and it's where it's not," Mr. Ketchum said. "It's not in his car (as it) should be if he had GSR on him when he left the house" if he had just fired a gun.

    Physics on trial
    No one can explain the two missed shots, Mr. Finigan said. And the shots that did enter Ms. Parineh entered through her cheek and her upper lip, atypical for a suicide, he said.

    The scene in the bedroom lacks a shadow without spattered blood -- a void that would have been created if another person were there pulling the trigger, Mr. Ketchum said. "I think the physical evidence in this case has helped us unravel what happened," he said. "A painstaking analysis can't establish that (Mr. Parineh) was in the room."

    There were strong indications that her body had been moved and the bedding rearranged after she died, Mr. Finigan said. She appears to have been face up when bleeding and on her side when found. It's natural for a body to be face up after a suicide, he said.

    The bloodstains on the gun were smeared and consistent with having been transferred from another surface rather than naturally acquired after the shot, Mr. Finigan said.

    Her hand was covered in blood, but photos show her fingertips were unstained. "She could have dropped that weapon, groped for it and pulled it back," rubbing her fingertips clean of blood in the process, Mr. Ketchum said. "If she's capable of voluntary movement (after the first shot), this is a reasonable interpretation. ... If you've shot yourself in the cheek and you're suffering, you may very well use two hands (to hold the gun)."

    If a body's been moved, an absence of blood on fingertips is unreliable, Mr. Finigan said.

    All four shots leave a similar trajectory of shell casings and bullet paths. If Ms. Parineh was on her side when she shot herself, Mr. Finigan asked, how would the trajectory of that final shot have differed? "This idea that somebody can shoot themselves in the head," he told the jury, "and somehow have the wherewithal to find the gun and try a different (two-handed) way to shoot it ... that's unreasonable. That's something you must reject."

    http://www.almanacnews.com/news/show_story.php?id=13697
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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    Jury finds slain wife did not commit suicide, was murdered by husband

    A Woodside man was found guilty of murdering his wife and covering it up as a suicide to collect insurance money Thursday afternoon in San Mateo County Superior Court, prosecutors said.

    After four days of deliberation, the jury returned with a guilty verdict of first-degree murder for Pooroushash "Peter" Parineh, 67, in the shooting death of his wife Parima Parineh on April 13, 2010.

    Parineh testified that on that day he found his 56-year-old wife's bloody body in bed in the master bedroom of their Woodside mansion.

    She was shot twice in the head, with wounds that prosecutors said could not have been self-inflicted.

    Parineh was in dire financial straits when his wife died, according to lawyers and witnesses from both the defense and prosecution.

    Five of his properties were in foreclosure and he was within days of being evicted from his Woodside home.

    Apparently his wife had more than $30 million worth of life insurance policies in her name, which prosecutors argued provided a motive for the suicide cover-up in her murder.

    The defense contested that Parima Parineh, an accomplished painter, was depressed in the months before her death and that she shot herself knowing her family was facing financial ruin.

    The defense argued that the gunshot would that entered from the right of her mouth and out the left side of her head might not have been fatal, allowing her to fire a second shot.

    At the end of the trial, which began mid-April, the jury found Parineh guilty of murder with the special circumstance of killing for financial gain and for using a firearm.

    Parineh is set to be sentenced on July 12. He faces a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Last year prosecutors decided not to seek the death penalty in the case.

    http://www.ktvu.com/news/news/crime-...e-was-m/nX2cW/
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  5. #5
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    The Woodside man convicted of shooting his wife twice in the head and staging the bloody bedroom of their foreclosed mansion to look like a suicide to activate more than $30 million in life insurance policies that eradicated a mountain of debt was sentenced Friday to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

    But before Pooroushasb “Peter” Parineh, 67, received the sentence, he read a lengthy handwritten letter to his three grown children, by turns telling them the monetary value of family items, describing his wife’s facelift and blaming them for what he said was his wife’s suicide.

    “You three pushed your mom, my wife for over 35 years, over the edge,” Parineh said after offering a litany of comments about their “self-entitled attitude” and lack of appreciation for their mother.

    Jurors deliberated nearly full four days in May before convicting Parineh of first-degree murder with the special allegation he did so for financial gain. Prosecutors opted against seeking the death penalty but the sentence imposed Friday means Parineh will die behind bars.

    “But you three don’t have the right to put me in my coffin alive,” he said, in reference to his sentencing.

    Judge Lisa Novak, who had to order Parineh to stand to receive the sentence, called the defendant a “shameful, petty, little man who has destroyed a family” and “should be ashamed of everything you said here today.”

    Novak told Parineh he has no one to blame for his circumstances but himself.

    “Your arrogance is exceeded only by your greed which is exceeded only by your cowardice,” Novak said.

    Parineh, who testified in his own defense, steadfastly maintained his innocence in his wife Parima Parineh’s April 13, 2010 shooting. Defense attorney Dek Ketchum told jurors Parima Parineh, 56, killed herself because she was bipolar, depressed and making a last-ditch effort to stave off the collapse of the family’s fortune while her life insurance policies were still valid. Ketchum also introduced evidence that she had overdosed on pills just six weeks before her death.

    Prosecutor Jeff Finigan built a case focused on the Parineh family’s financial collapse, from real estate empire to five properties in foreclosure — including the Fox Hill Road mansion where the crime happened — a commercial building that had been taken over for lack of payment and a legal judgment. The life insurance policies on Parima Parineh wiped out the debt, put an extra $600,000 in his pocket and deposited the rest in his three grown children’s trust from which he immediately tried to borrow, Finigan said.

    Finigan also informed jurors about Parineh’s remaining close friendship with a former mistress and questionable behavior after his wife’s death like avoiding the memorial service, staying in a hotel with the former paramour and hounding his children about the money. Jurors also learned that the March 2010 suicide attempt was possibly a pact with her husband in which he didn’t hold up his end of the bargain, Finigan said.

    But the drama of the case came to a head when the prosecution — wanting to dismiss the defense theories about bullet trajectories and how the victim could have shot the gun four times including twice in her own head — reconstructed the actual bedroom set in the middle of the courtroom. Coupled with graphic photos of Parima Parineh’s body, Finigan contended the blood splatter, bullet casings and oddities such as Parima Parineh’s tooth lying underneath her arm and a clean white pillow atop a blood smear showed her body was moved after death to more closely resemble a self-inflicted wound.

    The defense experts, however, constructed a shooting in which Parima Parineh held her husband’s .380-caliber gun in front of her head with both hands and fired.

    Finigan said after the verdict that jurors told him the totality of the evidence swayed them rather than one or two specific factors.

    On Friday, Ketchum asked Novak to delay Parineh’s transfer to prison because he has a very serious medical issue that requires a doctor visit first but Novak denied the request.

    http://www.smdailyjournal.com/articl...r/1771693.html

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