Suchana Seth, a most educated modern woman who worked as the chief executive officer (CEO) of an artificial intelligence start-up company ‘The Mindful AI Lab’. in Bengaluru, landed up killing her own son due to the growing pressure of allowing her son to meet her estranged husband. Her LinkedIn profile claims Suchana Seth is an AI ethics expert and data scientist with over 12 years of experience mentoring data science teams and scaling machine learning solutions at startups and industry research labs.
She is on the list of the 100 Most Brilliant Women in AI Ethics. She has been a Mozilla Fellow at Data & Society, a Fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Centre, and a research fellow at the Raman Research Institute. She also has natural language processing patents. A postgraduate from the University of Calcutta and a Raman Research Institute (RRI) research fellow, he spent two years at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Centre for Internet and Society.
Seth is from West Bengal and has been living in Bengaluru for a while. She married a South Indian. Seth’s husband, Venkat Raman, is from Kerala. It was a happy marriage, and the couple married in 2010, and their son was born in 2019. They had frequent fights but decided to split up in 2010.
She reached Goa with her 4-year-old to prevent her estranged husband from meeting him, as part of her court-ordered visitation rights. The couple is currently in the process of getting a divorce. Suchana was unhappy with the court order that permitted her estranged husband to see their son every Sunday. Her husband was out of the country at the time of the crime. He is currently in Jakarta and has been informed about the incident.
When her husband went out of India, she booked tickets for Goa. Checked into a service apartment with big suitcases. She spent quality time with her son. One day, she put him to sleep, and with a pillow, she choked his nose. The child died in deep sleep. After killing her son, she slit her wrist but could not succeed in committing suicide. The murder took place in a service apartment in Candolim, North Goa, between January 6 and 8.
She insisted hotel staff arrange a cab to travel to Bengaluru. However, the police discovered that the address provided by Suchana Seth was a forgery. When she checked out, the hotel staff noticed her missing son, who accompanied her at the time of check-in. Moreover, there were blood stains in the room. Hotel staff informed cops about the entire episode. The police contacted Suchana Seth through the cab driver and asked him to divert the cab to the nearest police station, where she was arrested.
The cops asked her about the boy. Suchana Seth told the police that he was staying at a friend’s place. Then the police opened her suitcases and found her son’s dead body. The absence of rigour mortis suggests that the child died over 36 hours ago, a longer period than typically observed in India. Dr. Naik also noted that there were no signs of blood loss or struggle marks on the child’s body. No one knows the exact time of death, but the guess is that the murder happened at night.
It doesn’t look like the child was strangulated using his hands. It looks like a pillow or some other material was used. Usually in India, rigour mortis resolves after 36 hours but in this child’s case, there was no rigour mortis. Rigour mortis is a postmortem change resulting in the stiffening of the body muscles due to chemical changes in their myofibrils. So, it has been more than 36 hours since his death. There was no blood loss or struggle marks on the body of the boy.
Venkat Raman arrived in Chitradurga, Karnataka, and gave the local authorities permission to conduct a post-mortem on his son’s body. She was clearly upset, and she barely spoke to cops or resisted arrest. She remained silent and did not respond to any of their questions.
What makes the crime even more frightening is the fact that Suchana Seth’s last post on Instagram was about her son, with the hashtag #whatwillhappen. She posted a picture of her son on October 12, 2023, showing him playing near an aquarium. The post received likes and comments from her friends and followers, who praised her son’s cuteness and curiosity. None of them could have imagined that the innocent boy would meet a tragic and brutal end at the hands of his own mother, just three months later. The investigations have shown that the deceased boy had spoken to his father over a video call on Sunday. Looking at the mortal remains of his son Chinmay lying on the autopsy table, Venkat Raman was inconsolable
Venkat Raman is also a tech entrepreneur based in Jakarta. The couple had separated a few years ago and were fighting for custody of their son. Suchana Seth had interim custody of her son and she did not want her husband to see him, even when she was mandated by the court to allow her ex-spouse to visit their child on Sundays. Venkaratarama and his family have not given any statements and have requested from the media that they talk about it later.
