A depressed Indian-origin women threw her 19-month-old daughter into the chilly Hudson River and then jumped in behind her in a murder-suicide attempt to get back at her husband, prosecutors said on Saturday.
The baby of 33-year-old Devi Silvia, the mother of two, was in critical condition and had to be taken to a trauma centre in Manhattan.
“She said she was sad and lonely and angry at her husband and that she did this horrific act on purpose,” assistant district attorney Robert Hettleman was quoted as saying by the New York Post.
“She made clear that she threw her baby in to the freezing river in order to get back at her husband,” he said, arguing successfully that the mother be held without bail.
The toddler, Jessica Prithiviraj, was blue and motionless when rescuers plucked her and Silvia from the roughly 10ºC water, Mr Hettleman said. He said the child was in stable condition on Friday. Silvia had told family members that she was desperate to take the child back to India, Mr Hettleman said. The family had been in the United States only a few years and, in that time, had travelled, for the husband’s job, to Chicago, California and New York City. The Indian national and mother of two was told of the charges at a Manhattan Criminal Court arraignment conducted via a video link to a conference room at Elmhurst Hospital, where she was being held in a psyche ward, the report said. —PTI