Neha Gupta Arrested; – Police arrested a doctor from Oklahoma City this week, accusing her of killing her 4-year-old daughter, who was found floating in the pool of their Miami rental home.
Neha Gupta, 36, was arrested Tuesday and will be charged with first-degree murder, the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office said in a statement, adding that officers had responded to a 911 call saying a child was drowning in a swimming pool.
However, a doctor who performed an autopsy did not find water in the child’s lungs or stomach and ruled out drowning as the cause of death, Kevin Rodriguez, a detective with the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office, wrote in an affidavit seen by The Washington Post. Rodriguez said he believed Gupta “attempted to conceal the killing of the deceased victim by staging an accidental drowning.”
The sheriff’s office said Gupta and her daughter, Aria Talathi, had traveled from Oklahoma City on June 25 and were staying at the rental property when Talathi was found in the pool, on June 27.
Gupta subsequently traveled back to Oklahoma City, triggering a multistate investigation, and Oklahoma City police officers and U.S. marshals from the Oklahoma City Metro Fugitive Task Force arrested Gupta on Tuesday in Edmond, a northern suburb of Oklahoma City. She was booked into the Oklahoma County Detention Center and charged with fleeing to avoid prosecution. She is pending extradition to Miami-Dade County.
Gupta’s lawyer Richard Cooper told the Associated Press that the doctor has denied murdering her daughter and that the charges against her were “absurd.” “No one thought in a million years that she would be charged with murder,” he told the AP. “She voluntarily gave multiple statements with me to the police, and they were always consistent.”
According to the affidavit, Gupta told investigators that she woke up her daughter, who was asleep after a day at the beach, at around 9 p.m. June 26 so they could have dinner. She said she and her daughter went to sleep together around 12:30 a.m. in the main bedroom of the rental home. Gupta told inv
Gupta told the investigators that she eventually saw her daughter submerged in the pool and that she tried to get her out but couldn’t because she didn’t know how to swim, the affidavit said. Gupta said that after trying for about 10 minutes, she called emergency services, the affidavit added.
An autopsy conducted by doctor Tuyet Tran at the medical examiner’s office found evidence that contradicted Gupta’s story, Detective Rodriguez wrote in the affidavit. In addition to ruling out drowning, Tran’s preliminary assessment found injuries on Talathi’s body that “are consistent with asphyxiation by smothering,” and Tran told the authorities she believes Talathi was dead before being placed in the pool. Finally, Tran found that Talathi’s stomach was empty, apparently contradicting Gupta’s claim that she ate dinner around 9 p.m. that night, the affidavit said.
Cooper told local ABC affiliate KOCO-TV that the Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office rushed to arrest and charge his client “without all the investigatory tools having come to fruition.”
