A WOMAN from India accused of tossing her toddler in the Hudson River before jumping in herself is a devoted mother and former mathematics teacher derailed by mental illness.
“This was a very unfortunate, traumatic and completely out-of-character incident,” Devi Silvia’s lawyer, Seema Iyer, told a judge. Ms Iyer said Mrs Silvia has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. But prosecutors say Mrs Silvia deliberately threw her 19-month-old daughter into the chilly water and then plunged in on May 11 to spite her husband.
Mrs Silvia, a native of India, pleaded not guilty to attempted murder and other charges today in a soft voice, with her lawyer asking the judge and prosecutors to speak slowly so she could understand. An interpreter fluent in her native Tamil was unavailable. Iyer planned to recap the proceedings for Silvia later in Tamil, spoken widely in Mrs Silvia’s home state of Tamil Nadu, on India’s southeast coast.
Mrs Silvia has a master’s degree in mathematics and taught high-school students in her homeland, Ms Iyer said. But in recent years, Mrs Silvia and her husband, Dominic J Prithiviraj, have moved around the US to follow his work, prosecutors said. By May, Mrs Silvia, 33, was lonely, longing to return to India and angry that her husband had been paying her little attention while tending to his hospitalised mother, authorities said.
“She said that she wanted to get back at them and to punish them,” a detective said in court papers released today. “She wanted to hurt her husband by hurting the baby.” Witnesses saw Mrs Silvia throw the child, Jessica Prithiviraj, into the river off a pedestrian pier on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and then jump in herself, police said. Both were rescued and survived, but Jessica was blue and motionless when pulled from the 10C water, prosecutors said.
A family court has appointed an aunt as guardian for Jessica and her six-year-old sister, and the aunt is taking them to India tomorrow to give them distance from their mother’s troubles, Ms Iyer said.
Mrs Silvia has been held in a jail hospital ward, where her psychiatric condition has stabilised, Ms Iyer said. Ms Iyer has asked a judge to release her; the judge may rule on Friday.
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