By Theresa Braine, New York Daily News (TNS)
A California man charged with killing a 71-year-old registered sex offender told police he’d been wanting to do it for years and found it every bit as fulfilling as he’d anticipated.
Varun Suresh, 29, was charged Monday with murder, armed individual causing great bodily injury and residential burglary, the Fremont Police Department said in a statement.
Police in the East Bay city had responded to a residence around noon Sept. 18 after receiving a 911 call regarding a “violent altercation between two individuals.” Upon arriving to the scene, they found David Brimmer “suffering from significant stab wounds” that officers’ immediate trauma care could not save him from.
Suresh was arrested outside the home, with investigators soon learning that he was on a mission to kill “child molesters.” He’d homed in on Brimmer via California’s Megan’s Law Website, which lists registered sex offenders in the state. Suresh told police he selected his victim based on his age, thinking the elderly man would “be easy to kill,” according to a probable cause affidavit.
Toting a bag, a notebook and a cup of coffee as props, Suresh knocked on several doors and pretended to be an accountant drumming up business so as not to arouse suspicion, according to court documents obtained by local media. He chatted with the person who answered Brimmer’s door until confident he was speaking to the man himself. The self-styled vigilante then whipped out a knife and went in for the kill, police said.
Brimmer bolted, Suresh followed, and they ended up in the kitchen of a home two blocks away. Suresh stabbed Brimmer in the neck. The marked man then stumbled outside, where Suresh pinned him down and stabbed him repeatedly in the neck, slitting his throat “to make sure it was done,” he told police.
The blood-soaked Suresh stood up, dropped the knife and lit a cigarette while waiting for law enforcement to arrive, The Mercury News reported. Laughing while in custody, the man told police he “didn’t feel sad at all” because killing Brimmer had been “honestly really fun.”
Suresh apparently thought killing a child molester was sanctioned and had several screenshots of Megan’s Law entrants on his phone.
“I’m hoping … that because he’s a pedophile … like, everyone hates pedophiles … so like, it should be cool,” Suresh told police, according to court documents. “I honestly don’t like pedophiles. They deserve to die.”