911 Audio – Graphic content (MP3)

A New London judge has found probable cause that 17-year-old Idris Elahi murdered Matthew Chew in downtown New London on Oct. 29.

Judge Patrick J. Clifford made the finding from the bench this afternoon when a hearing that began on Feb. 18 resumed in New London Superior Court. The state had been expected to call more witnesses but prosecutor Stephen M. Carney rested his case without doing so.

Defense attorney Bruce A. McIntyre entered a not-guilty plea on behalf of Elahi and the case was continued to March 14. Elahi is accused of fatally stabbing Matthew Chew in downtown New London on Oct. 29, 2010. He is the only one of six local teenagers charged in the case who opted for a probable cause hearing.

Rick and Marilyn Chew, in town from California for the hearing, said they would be returning West but would continue to follow the cases of Elahi and his five codefendants. The parents had come to Connecticut seeking answers about their son's death, and Rick Chew said that "as painful and disconcerting" as it was to hear the details, the couple had gotten the information for which they came.

Elahi's parents, Damita and Muneer Elahi, were talking with their son's attorney after the hearing. Ms. Elahi has not responded to requests for an interview with The Day.

As the hearing got underway on Feb. 18, three of Elahi's codefendants testified that the group was watching television and playing video games at Elahi's house on Home Street when they decided to go downtown and jump somebody. They said that Rahshad Perry dared Elahi to stab somebody and that the two gave each other "dap," a type of handshake oath.

Brian Rabell, Marquis Singleton and Tyree Bundy, who are all charged as accessories to murder, said they looked for a victim downtown and had targeted another man but gave up on him when he got into a car. They said they saw Chew walking alone on Huntington Street and attacked him.

Chew, 25, had clocked out of his cook's job at Two Wives Restaurant a short time earlier. He was able to tell a passerby who found him lying in the road at the intersection of Huntington and Jay streets that he had been jumped and stabbed. He died early the next morning, at Yale-New Haven Hospital, of multiple stab wounds.