The Mindful AI Lab CEO Suchana Seth, who was arrested for allegedly killing her four-year-old son in a shocking incident, likely suffocated him to death, a senior doctor’s post-mortem report on Tuesday revealed. The tragic incident took place in a staff apartment in Goa. Suchana Seth was arrested in Karnataka’s Chitradurga while she was on her way from Goa to Bengaluru. The arrest was made on the instructions of the Goa Police. The boy’s body was discovered in a suitcase.
According to Hiriyur Taluk Hospital Administrative Officer Dr. Kumara Naik, the young boy was allegedly suffocated to death, probably with a cloth or pillow, not with his hands. Absence of rigor mortis indicates that the child died more than 36 hours ago, which is longer than usual in India. Dr. Naik also noted that there were no signs of blood loss or signs of struggle on the child’s body. However, he did not give the exact time of death.
After the incident, Seth allegedly attempted suicide by slitting his left wrist. However, she later decided against it and returned to Bengaluru carrying her son’s body in a bag via a tourist taxi. The information emerged from the initial police investigation.
A 39-year-old businessman from West Bengal, a resident of Bengaluru, was remanded in police custody for six days by a local court in Goa. A woman is believed to have killed her son to prevent her estranged husband from seeing him, as part of court-ordered visitation rights. The couple is currently in the process of divorcing.
Sources told India Today that Suchana Seth was reportedly unhappy with the court order that allowed her estranged husband to see their son every Sunday.
Police confirmed that the woman’s husband was out of the country at the time of the crime. He is currently in Jakarta and has been informed of the incident.
Seth is a respected AI ethicist and data scientist with over 12 years of rich experience leading data science teams and scaling machine learning solutions at various startups and industrial research labs. Her professional achievements include being named to the list of 100 Brilliant Women in Artificial Intelligence Ethics and holding patents in natural language processing. She was a Mozilla Fellow at Data & Society, a Berkman Klein Center Fellow at Harvard University, and a Research Fellow at the Raman Research Institute.
