Doctor Is Arrested After Death of Her Young Daughter

An Oklahoma medical doctor is accused of traveling to South Florida and staging the death of her 4-year-old daughter to make it appear the child drowned in the swimming pool at their rented vacation home in the middle of the night, detectives say. Dr. Neha Gupta, a 36-year-old pediatrician, was booked into the Oklahoma County Jail in Oklahoma City on Tuesday, per the AP. She is accused of first-degree murder in Miami-Dade County, an arrest warrant states.

Gupta "attempted to conceal the killing of the deceased victim by staging an accidental drowning within the swimming pool of a rental property," a Miami-Dade sheriff's homicide detective wrote in an affidavit obtained by the AP. In addition to facing the murder charge in Florida, she is accused of fleeing to the Oklahoma City area where she lives to avoid prosecution in Florida, according to jail records. Gupta is jailed without bond, and Florida authorities are seeking her return to Miami to face the murder charge.

Gupta told investigators that she was sleeping with her daughter Aria at the Airbnb rental home in El Portal, north of Miami, when she heard a noise around 3:20am on June 27. She said that she noticed a sliding-glass door in the bedroom that led to the patio was open, and that she then found Aria under water and unresponsive in the deep end of the pool, the affidavit states. Gupta said she tried to save the girl, but told the detective that she doesn't know how to swim and was unable to get Aria out of the water.

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A doctor who performed an autopsy at the medical examiner's office did not find water in the child's lungs or stomach, and "based on these findings she was able to rule out drowning as being the cause of death," the detective wrote. Dr. Tuyet Tran also advised authorities that she believes the child was dead before being placed in the pool, the detective wrote. The cause and manner of death are pending, but Tran found injuries such as bruising within the girl's cheeks. Tran's preliminary findings are that these injuries "are consistent with asphyxiation by smothering," the affidavit states.