Goa murder: How did Bengaluru CEO Suchana Seth’s son die? Postmortem report reveals gruesome details

The four-year-old son of Suchana Seth, the chief executive officer (CEO) of an artificial intelligence start-up company in Bengaluru, was smothered to death, said Dr Kumar Naik, who conducted the post-mortem.

Suchana Seth, the CEO of The Mindful AI Lab, was arrested from Chitradurga in Karnataka on Monday night for allegedly killing her son at a service apartment in Goa during a vacation last week.

Suchana Seth, 39, was on her way from Goa to Bengaluru carrying the boy’s body which was recovered in a suitcase. She was arrested on the directions of the Goa Police.

“He (the child) was strangled to death or what we call smothering. Either a cloth or a pillow was used. The child died due to strangulation. It doesn’t look like the child was strangulated using hands. It looks like a pillow or some other material was used. The Rigor mortis had resolved in the child,” Hiriyur Taluk Hospital’s administrative officer in Chitradurga Dr Kumar Naik told reporters.

“Usually in India, rigor mortis resolves after 36 hours but in this child’s case, there was no rigor mortis (stiffening of the body muscles due to chemical changes in their myofibrils). So, it has been more than 36 hours since his death,” news agency PTI quoted Naik as saying. Naik added that there was no blood loss or struggle marks on the child’s body.

Naik, however, said they could not say the exact time but it had been 36 hours since his death.

In Goa, a senior police officer involved in the investigation also claimed that the child was smothered, “possibly using a pillow from the service apartment”, The Indian Express reported.

“There was no murder weapon. She allegedly tried to kill herself by slitting her wrists using a pair of scissors. Blood samples have been collected and a DNA test will be done to verify this,” the newspaper quoted the officer as saying.

Who is Suchana Seth?

Suchana Seth is the CEO of ‘The Mindful AI Lab’.

Her LinkedIn profile claims Suchana Seth is an AI ethics expert and data scientist with over 12 years of experience in mentoring data science teams, and scaling machine learning solutions at startups and industry research labs.

“She is on the 100 Brilliant Women in AI Ethics List. She has been a Mozilla Fellow at Data & Society, a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Centre at Harvard University, and a research fellow at the Raman Research Institute. She also holds patents in natural language processing,” the profile read. Seth is an expert in ‘AI Ethics Advisory & Audits’ and ‘Responsible AI Strategy’,” it shows.A postgraduate from the University of Calcutta, and a research fellow from Raman Research Institute (RRI) and spent two years at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Seth hails from West Bengal and has been living in Bengaluru.

Seth’s husband Venkat Raman is from Kerala.

Some media reports said the couple tied the knot in 2010, and their son was born in 2019. However, disputes led to them filing for a divorce in 2020.

Estranged husband returns from Jakarta

Suchana Seth’s estranged husband Venkat Raman returned to India from Jakarta on Tuesday evening on learning about his child’s murder, police said.

Venkat Raman arrived at Chitradurga in Karnataka, and gave his consent to the local authorities to conduct a post-mortem on his son’s body, the police added.

What we know about the Goa murder

The murder took place in a service apartment at Candolim in North Goa between January 6 and 8, the Goa police claimed. Suchana Seth had checked into the service apartment with her son on January 6. After staying there for a couple of days, the CEO left for Bengaluru in a taxi on January 8 morning. When the apartment staffers went to clean the room in which she stayed, they found blood stains on a towel.

They immediately informed the Goa Police and told them that she carried an unusually heavy bag, and her child was not seen with her, police said. The police in Goa contacted their counterparts in Chitradurga, who checked Seth’s bag in which they found the body of the child. She was arrested there and later brought to Goa, where a court remanded her in police custody for six days.