WSB's Veronica Waters reports 68-year-old Chiman Rai could get the death penalty if convicted of arranging the contract killing of 22-year-old Sparkle Reid Rai in April of 2000.

A young woman--whose name has been mentioned in the case's investigation and in opening statements, but has now been ordered by the judge not to be broadcast or published while she is jailed on a probation violation--took the stand and says she witnessed the beginning of the fatal attack on Rai.

The woman, now 25, says she was around 16 years old when she and her best friend took a ride with her older cousin, Cleveland Clark. The trio went to an apartment complex in Union City. She says Clark urged the girls to knock on the door and ask whomever answered whether she did hair. They did so, and reported back to Clark, who was waiting in his truck. He told them to go back and ask to use the restroom. When Sparkle Rai answered the door a second time, she gave them permission to come in--and that's when the witness says Clark pushed in behind them with a gun, pulling a bandana over his nose and mouth, ordering Rai to the floor.

Her voice soft and sometimes quivering, the woman demonstrated for jurors how her cousin stood over Rai, pointing a gun at her head, following her while she crawled through the kitchen and back toward the foyer. The prosecutor got on her hands and knees, showing Rai's position. The witness says Clark yelled, asking the new mom, "Where's the dope?" but Rai was bewildered and told him she had no idea what he was talking about. Her baby daughter was on the sofa.

"He asked her was her name Sparkle," the woman said. She said Rai told him yes.

Clark's cousin testified that he grabbed a vacuum cleaner cord.

"He wrapped the cord around her neck, and he was pulling it and he put his foot on her head," she testified. "She was reaching, like trying to get away, and her baby was getting, like, upset. She was whining. I think she was about to cry."

The witness's friend picked up the little girl to rock and soothe her as just a few feet away, her mother was being brutally strangled.

"She was kinda gagging and blood started coming out of her mouth," the young woman testified. At some point, Clark told the teens to go outside and wait for him in the truck. She saw a butcher knife in his hand.

Five to 10 minutes later, she says, Clark came outside and was wiping down a knife with a towel. She didn't see blood. He climbed into the truck.

"He asked if we were okay," she said.

"Did you answer him?" asked prosecutor Eleanor Ross.

"I said yes," the woman replied.

"How were you feeling at that time?" asked Ross.

"Sick," she said.

Later, at her home in Decatur, she and her friend saw the 5:00 TV news, during which they reported about a murder at a Union City apartment, and they recognized the complex as the one they'd visited earlier. Worrying about the fate of the baby, they tuned in to other reports.

"We were trying to find out...we went upstairs to watch the news again, because we were thinking about the baby and we thought he did something to the baby, too," she said.

She says she looked out of the window and saw her cousin outside talking on the cordless phone. She pressed the speakerphone button on the base unit near her to listen in.

"He told some man that, 'It's done.' And they told him, 'Okay. Come on back,'" she testified.

Prosecutors say Chiman Rai, a businessman and a math professor at Alcorn State University in Lorman, Mississippi, paid $10,000 to have his black daughter-in-law killed because he wanted his son married to an eligible woman of Indian descent. His lawyers argue the death was a robbery turned deadly.

The young woman says she never told police about the killing because she was afraid. But four years later, when her friend was arrested on drug charges, the friend told police she knew about a murder--and that's when police relaunched the probe into the cold case that was Sparkle Reid Rai's murder.

Clark (right) is also facing his own death penalty trial in the Rai murder.

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