Sheetal Ranot, an Ozone Park, Queens, woman faces up to 25 years in prison after being found guilty of assault and endangering the welfare of a child for the “brutal abuse” of her stepdaughter when she was about 12-year-old.
In one instance, the child was hit by Ranot with a broken metal broom handle that cut her wrist down to the bone and required hospitalization and surgery and was coldly left in a pool of blood, the Queens District Attorney’s office announced July 29. The injury required hospitalization and surgery.
Sheetal Ranot, 31, and her husband Rajesh Ranot, 46, were behind bars July 26 after their arraignments the previous week on multiple charges of assault and child endangerment.
Rajesh Ranot, the victim’s biological father was also charged with second- and third-degree assault, first-degree unlawful imprisonment and endangering the welfare of a child. The husband and wife’s case was severed at the start of Ranot’s trial. Rajesh Ranot will be tried at a later date.
“A jury weighed the evidence, which included the once-undernourished victim’s testimony in court, and found the defendant guilty of abusing the girl for more than a year and half. The pre-teen was locked in her bedroom by her step-mother without food or even water for extended periods of time,” District Attorney Richard A. Brown said in a statement.
“The victim was struck with a metal broom handle and a wooden rolling pin until she was bloody and still carries these scars and others on her body to this day. No child deserves to be treated in this manner,” Brown said.
The girl, identified in published reports as Maya Ranot, weighed a skeletal 58 pounds because of the escalating violence. She, however, survived to tell the tale of her suffering and torture at the hands of her parents in their Ozone Park home.
After a day of deliberations, a jury convicted Ranot of first-degree assault and endangering the welfare of a child. Queens Supreme Court Justice Richard L. Buchter, who presided over the three-week-long trial, set sentencing for September 8.
On May 6, 2014, when medical personnel arrived at the family residence after Sheetal Ranot hit Maya with a broken metal broom handle, they found Maya lying in a pool of blood in the kitchen with the tendons to her left wrist cut to the bone.
At that time, Maya was transported to Elmhurst Hospital where she underwent surgery for her wrist and received stitches to her knee. Doctors observed several bruises, marks and scars in various stages of healing throughout Maya’s body during that hospital stay.
“Thank God! It’s about time they locked him up. Everyone is afraid of him . . . How could he do this to his own daughter?” the Daily News quoted one of Rajesh Ranot’s former in-laws who was not identified by his name as asking.
Maya was beaten with everything from a rolling pin to a baseball bat to a broken metal broom handle — but never said a word because she feared her four step-siblings would be sent to foster care, officials were quoted as saying.
“Fortunately, she found the courage to speak up,” Brown said. “It is not too hard to imagine that this case would have ended in the child’s death.”
According to the Daily News report, neighbors described Rajesh Ranot, a cab driver who lived in the area for the last 10 years, as a volatile man with a foul temper and a mean streak. “He was the kind of guy who would be your friend and smack you at the same time,” said a neighbor who gave his name as Trinny. “You could not trust him.”
Local residents recounted seeing the skinny little seventh-grader Maya playing near the family’s residence, with no signs of her family or any friends.
A September 2014 New York Times report said Maya’s ordeal started in 2011, when a custody dispute placed her with her father. Relatives and a friend of her mother, Ramona Roy, said Ranot fabricated claims that Roy abused Maya. Their contention could not be verified by the newspaper because family court records are not public.
In January 2011, Maya moved in with her father’s new family, on the top floor of his red-and-white duplex, on a block filled largely with families of Indian descent from Guyana and Trinidad.
At that time the Times report said quoting neighbors that they noticed that Maya’s clothes were often dirty and that she was always doing chores and caring for her four stepsiblings, who looked healthier and cleaner. “I was told this is normal — stepmothers don’t like stepkids in India,” neighbor Bematie Singh from Guyana told the newspaper. “Maya was like the maid.”
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