Classmates saw no warning signs

When St. John’s freshmen Divya Madhu and Robert Marchan returned to their Discovering New York (DNY) class on Monday, October 1, one of the seats in the front of the classroom was noticeably empty.
For the first month of the school year, 22-year-old freshman Omesh Hiraman, the man charged with bringing a .50-caliber rifle onto the St. John’s campus on Wednesday, September 26 that led to a three-hour campus-wide lockdown, occupied that seat.
He sat in a row by himself in the small DNY class of less than 20 freshman honor students, and Madhu and Marchan, both 17, said they were shocked to hear that their classmate, who they described as smart, eloquent and always participating in class would bring a gun to school.
“The news is making him seem like this crazy, psycho person and that’s not at all who we saw,” Marchan said.
Queens District Attorney Richard Brown, charged Hiraman, who attended Stuyvesant High School and Cornell University before enrolling at St. John’s as a freshman this year, with two counts of fourth-degree criminal possession of a weapon (with intent to use) and several violations of the New York City Administrative
Code (possession of a rifle without a permit or a certificate of registration).
Hiraman, who is next scheduled court date is Tuesday, October 9, could face up to more than a year in prison if convicted.
“Clearly, this is a troubled young man,” Brown said.
Hiraman’s attorney, Anthony Colleluori said that his client is a schizophrenic and made comments that Hiraman became disturbed in the aftermath of 9/11.
Both Marchan and Madhu recalled seeing Hiraman around campus, usually walking alone, but they said he never displayed any disturbing signs inside or outside the classroom.
Madhu said that she would talk to him on their way out of class and whenever he bumped into him on campus, and she remembered him telling her about his scoliosis.
“He [Hiraman] told me about the surgery he had because of his scoliosis, but he never mentioned he was on medication,” Madhu said.
However, she said that when class resumed on Monday, her professor told the class that at one of the earlier class sessions, Hiraman left the lecture for an extended period and told the teacher he was vomiting because of the medications.
“I’m not trying to say he wasn’t wrong [for bringing the gun to campus],” Marchan said. “But, he totally didn’t seem like the kind of kid who wanted to hurt people.”