A Queens man has been charged with murder after investigators said his wife’s remains were found months apart in two remote parts of the borough, ending a missing-person case that began last summer and turning it into a homicide prosecution.
Queens prosecutors said Rupchand Simboo, 74, was arraigned late Wednesday on a criminal complaint accusing him of killing his wife, Salisha Ali, 33, then hiding parts of her body in separate locations in Queens. The case now matters on two tracks at once: it answers the central question of who police say is responsible, but it leaves key facts unsettled, including motive, the exact medical cause of death and whether prosecutors will add charges as forensic work continues. Simboo was ordered held and is due back in court March 16.
According to Queens District Attorney Melinda Katz, the known timeline begins on the evening of July 13, 2025, when Simboo and Ali were both inside his home in South Ozone Park. Prosecutors said Ali did not show up the next morning for her job in Brooklyn and was never seen or heard from again. Six days later, on July 19, Simboo called 911 to report her missing, prosecutors said, after Ali’s mother asked him to do so. The case appeared to stall in public until Sept. 22, when two New York City sanitation workers on an early morning route near 149th Avenue and Brookville Boulevard spotted a blue moving blanket tied with yellow rope around a large object in a wooded area. Prosecutors said the workers opened it and found what appeared to be a decomposed female torso. It was later identified as Ali’s.
That first discovery gave detectives a body, but not a full picture of how the remains had been moved or where the rest had gone. Prosecutors said search warrants later executed at Simboo’s home and at his work garage produced items they believe linked him to the dumping sites. At the house, investigators recovered plastic wrap and yellow rope that the NYPD laboratory found to be consistent with the rope used around the torso, according to the complaint. In the garage, prosecutors said, detectives found a moving blanket identical to the one wrapped around the remains. The case broke open further on March 5 and March 6, when detectives found additional remains, including a head, legs and an arm, in the Jamaica Wildlife Refuge off Cross Bay Boulevard, south of the North Channel Bridge. Prosecutors said the later search was guided by GPS data from the Life360 app on Simboo’s phone, which placed him at the refuge on July 14 and near Brookville Boulevard on July 15.
The geography of the case helps explain why it drew such intense attention in New York. The first site sat near the edge of Queens by JFK Airport, along a corridor where city workers and passing drivers might not immediately notice what had been left in the brush. The second site was in and near the Jamaica Bay refuge, a marshy and isolated area where a discovery can depend on a cleanup crew, a maintenance team or detectives searching with a reason to focus on one stretch of shoreline or roadside. Police and prosecutors have not said publicly when they first suspected Simboo, but the charging narrative suggests the investigation moved from a missing-person report to a body identification, then to warrants, digital records and a renewed search that eventually produced more remains. By the time of the arrest, the case had become less about a disappearance and more about whether the evidence could show concealment, movement and intent well enough to support a murder complaint in court.
Public reporting has added some personal context that the criminal complaint does not spell out in detail. Ali was last seen alive during a FaceTime call with relatives on July 13, according to police accounts cited in local reporting. News outlets also reported that she met Simboo in 2023 while living in Trinidad and moved to New York in 2024, when the two married. Those details gave the case a wider emotional reach because relatives had continued searching for answers long after Ali stopped showing up for work and stopped communicating in the way they expected. The complaint itself does not describe a motive, a fight or a confession. It does not say whether anyone else saw Ali alive after the evening of July 13. It also does not explain why, if prosecutors say the killing happened that night, a missing-person report was still made nearly a week later. Those gaps are likely to matter as the case moves forward and as prosecutors decide how much more of their evidence to put on the public record.
The formal charges are serious and specific. Prosecutors said Simboo is charged with second-degree murder, two counts of concealment of a human corpse and two counts of tampering with physical evidence. Queens Criminal Court Judge Sharifa Nasser-Cuellar remanded him and set March 16 for his next court appearance. If he is convicted of the top count, prosecutors said, he faces up to 25 years to life in prison. As of Thursday, authorities had not identified a defense lawyer speaking on his behalf, and the court papers made public so far remain accusations rather than findings of guilt. Investigators also have not said whether the medical examiner has fixed a final cause of death, though police reporting before the arraignment said Ali’s death had been ruled a homicide. That means the public case is now ahead on the who and when, but still less clear on the exact how and why.
Katz said Simboo went to “extraordinary lengths” to avoid responsibility, a phrase that captured how prosecutors want jurors to view the sequence of a missing-person report, a torso found by sanitation workers and later remains recovered after detectives examined phone data. The city workers who stumbled onto the first site, and the detectives who went back into the refuge months later, became essential parts of the case without ever being central public figures in it. Their discoveries turned a quiet disappearance into a court case with a date, a defendant and a detailed accusation. Even now, though, the story remains incomplete in important ways. Prosecutors have not publicly laid out a motive. Police have not described any final forensic ruling on cause of death. And no court testimony has yet tested the evidence that investigators say ties the two dumping sites back to one home and one phone.
As of Thursday, Simboo was being held on the complaint filed by Queens prosecutors, and the next public milestone was his March 16 court appearance. What comes after that will likely depend on whether prosecutors move toward indictment and whether additional forensic findings sharpen the still unanswered questions at the center of Ali’s death.