An Oklahoma medical doctor is accused of traveling to South Florida and staging the death of her 4-year-old daughter to make it appear the child drowned in the swimming pool at their rented vacation home in the middle of the night, detectives say.
Dr. Neha Gupta, a 36-year-old pediatrician, was booked into the Oklahoma County Jail in Oklahoma City on Tuesday. She is accused of first-degree murder in Miami-Dade County, an arrest warrant states.
Gupta “attempted to conceal the killing of the deceased victim by staging an accidental drowning within the swimming pool of a rental property,” a Miami-Dade sheriff’s homicide detective wrote in an affidavit obtained by The Associated Press.
But her lawyer, Richard Cooper of Miami, said he and Gupta cooperated with authorities by telling their account of what happened and were surprised when the first-degree murder charge was announced. The doctor, he said, is a victim of a terrible tragedy.
“No one thought in a million years that she would be charged with murder,” Cooper said in an interview Thursday.
In addition to facing the murder charge in Florida, she is accused of fleeing to the Oklahoma City area where she lives to avoid prosecution in Florida, according to jail records. Gupta is jailed without bond, and Florida authorities are seeking her return to Miami to face the murder charge.
Gupta told investigators that she was sleeping with her daughter Aria at the Airbnb rental home in El Portal, north of Miami, when she heard a noise around 3:20 a.m. on June 27. She noticed a sliding-glass door in the bedroom that led to the outdoor patio was open.
Cooper said he visited the home after the child’s death and found the latch to the sliding-glass door to be so easily opened that he was able to do so with his pinky finger.
“Her story made sense to me,” he said. “It matched up. She voluntarily gave multiple statements with me to the police, and they were always consistent.”
Gupta says she tried to save daughter
Gupta said that once she awoke and went outside, she found Aria under water and unresponsive in the deep end of the pool, the affidavit states.
Gupta said she tried to save the girl, but told the detective that she doesn’t know how to swim and was unable to get Aria out of the water.
Police and firefighters arrived and performed CPR on the girl, but Aria was pronounced dead at a hospital before dawn.
A doctor who performed an autopsy at the medical examiner’s office did not find water in the child’s lungs or stomach, and that “based on these findings she was able to rule out drowning as being the cause of death,” the detective wrote. Dr. Tuyet Tran also advised authorities that she believes the child was dead before being placed in the pool, the detective wrote.
Investigator finds signs of asphyxiation
The cause and manner of death are pending, but Tran found injuries such as bruising within the girl’s cheeks. Tran’s preliminary findings are that these injuries “are consistent with asphyxiation by smothering,” the affidavit states.
Police have not revealed any possible motive in the case. The detective noted in the affidavit that Gupta shares custody of the child with her ex-husband, who told detectives that he and his ex-wife are involved in an ongoing custody battle over the girl.
The ex-husband also told detectives that he was unaware that Gupta and the child had traveled to South Florida. Based on surveillance video and Airbnb records, investigators determined that Gupta and her daughter were the sole occupants of the rental unit, the affidavit states.
Cooper said he has seen no real evidence that would support the charge, and he plans to arrange for an independent autopsy.
“Unfortunately what they do have is a mother who I was with all day, crying,” he said. “We were crying together, we were hugging. And now she’s in a jail cell missing her own daughter’s funeral.”
“I was in the car with her and she was on the phone with funeral homes, doing the things that we as parents pray – pray – to never have to do,” he said.
Gupta practiced medicine at Oklahoma Children’s Hospital, part of the University of Oklahoma’s health system, according to records from the Oklahoma Board of Medical Licensure and Supervision. The university’s faculty directory showed that she has also been an assistant professor at the university’s health sciences center.
The University of Oklahoma and its health system released a statement this week saying that Gupta has been “suspended from patient care, given notice of termination, and was no longer seeing patients at the health system as of May 30, 2025.”
Gupta has also been given a “notice of termination” by the university, the statement said.
The statement did not explain why Gupta had not been seeing patients as of late May, nor did it specify why the university cut ties with her.
“From what I know of Dr. Gupta, I know she’s going through a rough patch in her life,” Cooper said. “Her life was crumbling a little bit — she lost her husband, her job was in a little bit of jeopardy.”
However, “to think that could ever lead to murdering your own child — it’s absurd.”
