Eighteen months before she was killed with a machete in a Scarborough laneway, Tharshika Jeganathan sat in the witness box of an east-end courthouse, detailing the alleged abuse at the hands of her new husband. The couple had recently wedded in India in an arranged marriage, and Jeganathan had since joined Sasikaran Thanapalasingam and his family in Toronto. She’d left behind relatives, friends and a government job in Sri Lanka.Within days of her arrival on Feb. 23, 2017, Jeganathan began feeling uneasy about her husband. She found a box of condoms and pornography and believed he’d been unfaithful, she said. Thanapalasingam refused to get her a SIM card to talk to relatives on a cellphone, telling her “in this country, only the husband uses the phone,” she testified. She began sleeping on the sofa.When she raised her concerns with him, they argued. In early March 2017, she was with Thanapalasingam in a car when she alleged he grabbed her left arm and painfully twisted it. She alleged that six days later, he suddenly shoved her head into a pillow while the two were in their living room. She told the court that she’d struggled to break free for between two and three minutes before she bit Thanapalasingam’s hand, and he let her go. “It became very painful. I started screaming and crying,” Jeganathan said through a Tamil interpreter in the February 2018 trial, where Thanapalasingam was charged with two counts of assault. “It was terrible. I found it so difficult,” she said, her voice high and soft.While he was holding her head down, she alleged he’d asked her: “Do you know who I am? Do you know what I am capable of?”After a swift trial, a Scarborough judge acquitted Thanapalasingam, now 38, of assaulting Jeganathan, by then his estranged wife, saying inconsistencies in her evidence had raised reasonable doubt about whether the violence happened.A year and a half later, Thanapalasingam is c ...
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