Welcome back to the Pathway Chili. I'm Robin, I'm Jules, and I'm
Ashley. Let's dive right into this week's case. February eighth, two thousand
and five, Totowa, New Jersey, Forty three year old chemist Gita Angara
shows up to worker shift at the Passaic Valley Water Commission treatment facility, which
turns up missing. The following day, Gita's body is discovered inside one of
the water tanks, and her cause of death is determined to be drowning.
A number of bruises on Gita's neck and body suggests that she got into a
violent struggle before she was placed in the tank, so her case is classified
as a homicide. Police investigated a number of Guida's coworkers, but the killer
is never identified and the motive for the crime remains unknown. After that,
the path went chilly, So we've got a pretty harrowing case to cover today,
the two thousand and five death of Ghita Anghara. The victim in this
story is a chemist who emigrated to the United States from India in order to
start a family and wound up getting a job at a water treatment plant.
However, she inexplicably vanished during one of her shifts before her body was discovered
inside one of the plant's water tanks. The evidence seemed to suggest that someone
violently attacked Ghita and choked her to death before removing a panel from the floor
and dumping her body inside the tank. Given that the plant was a secure
facility which could not be acts by outsiders, it seemed obvious that Gita was
killed by one of her co workers, but in spite of an extensive investigation,
no one can figure out who is responsible or what their motive could have
been, and believe it or not. There are also some people who believe
that Gita's death might have actually been a tragic accident, which occurred when she
failed to notice an open panel in the floor and wound up falling into the
tank. Whatever the case, there's still no conclusive answers about what happened,
So we're going to explore all the different theories on today's episode. So,
like you guys said, there's really no other explanation. She's in this secured
area where it has to be one of her coworkers or someone who has access
to the plant, and so your pool is quite small, but with no
evidence and no idea of what was going on. It's almost more maddening to
know that we have a lineup of people that have to be the suspect,
and yet there's really nothing to go on to say we can narrow it down
to these three, or this is where we can go accusing one of these
people of her homicide. It's quite tragic. It's not one of those cases
where you say, what could have happened, We know what happened, and
now it's who did it. Yeah, it's almost like a setup with an
old school murder mystery, where you have a certain amount of people in a
secure facility and you realize that only one of these people had to have committed
the murder. But unlike a piece of fiction, they were not able to
narrow it down just one suspect and solve the mystery. It was pretty much
we have a whole bunch of people working here, and we know one of
them had to have done this, but we can't figure out who did it
or why, and that's why it's so frustrating. One case, this reminds
me of what was the name of the woman, Robin she I think she
worked for Southwest oh Sue Tarascalis, Sue Tarascoiz just because of the male dominated
workplace, her being a woman up in a really high position. I know
you will you'll later draw parallels to another case, but this one really reminded
me of that, just because of all of the adversity that she faced it
inner workplace. Yeah, that's definitely a good comparison, because, as we're
going to talk about, it was rumored that there was a lot of animosity
towards Geta for having such a high position in the plant. But unlike Sue
Tarascoitz case, it doesn't sound like she faced any outward harassment or there are
any solid suspects who really wanted to harmor so we still have no idea if
that could have been the reason for her death. Our story begins in two
thousand and five in Totawa, New Jersey, a borough in Passaic County which
has a population of around ten thousand people and is located about twelve miles outside
of Newark. Our central figure is forty three year old Gita Angara, who
works at the treatment facility for the Passaic Valley Water Commission. The commission is
responsible for providing drinking water to over eight hundred thousand residents, and their facility
purifies an estimated eighty three million gallons of water every day. Gita originally from
Chennai, India, and became the first woman to ever attend Loyola College when
the school officially became co ed. She wound up earning both a bachelor's and
a master's degree in chemistry and received a gold medal after graduating as the top
student in her class. Gita also got married to her husband, Jaya Angara,
and the couple would immigrate to the United States in nineteen eighty four.
After attaining additional master's degrees and a doctorate in organic chemistry and New York University,
Gita eventually started her job with the Passaic Valley Water Commission. By this
point, she has been employed at the water treatment plant for over twelve years
and lives with her family about forty five minutes away in Holmdel Township. Gita
and Jaya now have two daughters, nineteen year old Pavitra and nine year old
Priya, along with a thirteen year old son named Vivic. In two thousand
and four, Gita would earn her plant operator's license and was promoted to the
position of senior chemists, which meant she would be responsible for the calibration of
one hundred and thirty five devices of the plant, including water clarity sensors.
At this point, the facility is currently in the midst of a seventy million
dollar project which will transition from the usage of chlorine treatments to purify the water
to an ozone disinfection system instead. One of Gida's responsibilities is to oversee the
new ozone generators and ensure that the plant's water quality remains within the standards of
the Environmental Protection Agency. On the morning of February the eighth, Guida arrived
at the water treatment facility to beginner shift, which ran from eight am until
four pm. Shortly before ten am, Guida was chatting with some of her
coworkers in the break room when the technicians from her lab walked in and informed
her that the plant's filters and clarity sensors needed to be calibrated. Shortly thereafter,
Geita returned to the lab, and sometime between ten fifteen and ten thirty
she left the area. Will carry a clipboard, a beaker, and a
two way radio. The instruments which needed to be calibrated were located in the
plant's basement, which was a series of eight foot wide tunnels lined with large
pipes. When Geeda did not return, the lab technician, who asked her
to go down there, went into the basement to search for He noticed some
broken glass on the floor, but could not find Gida, and when he
returned upstairs to ask if anyone had seen her anywhere, they said they didn't
know where she was. Well, in spite of this, several more hours
would pass before anyone at the plant made a big deal about Geda's absence.
That right there speaks volumes of what the culture and climate would be because this
is a supervisor. This is someone a with her license to help run this
whole facility. She's a mom and a wife. She's a hard worker,
she's an immigrant who has quite a success story. And yet when you see
signs that there's been a struggle, something dangerous has happened, you don't seem
to raise any concern for her. To me, that shows a culture climate
that's not healthy from the start. Well, to make another parallel to the
Sue Tarascuoitz case which we talked about, that was one where the victim went
missing when she went on a lunch run to get sandwiches for entire crew,
and she never returned for the rest of her shift, and no one sounded
the alarm. She was never even reported missing for another thirty six hours,
and that showed a major cultural problem going on in here. And it's pretty
much the same thing with Geta, where she can disappear or she can leave
some broken fragments from a lab beaker behind, yet nobody really does anything.
For several hours that evening, Guita was supposed to give one of her daughters
a ride to a basketball game, but never showed up. She also failed
to return home, and all calls to her cell phone went unanswered. At
around nine pm, the plant was ready to close for the day, but
one of the guards noticed that Gita's car was still in the parking lot.
It turned out that Guitah's coat, purse, and cell phone were still inside
the lab and the soundwhich she'd been planning to eat for lunch, was on
her desk. A search was performed to the plant and an interesting discovery was
made in the basement corridor next to the spot where the lap technician had discovered
broken glass earlier. That day. There was a series of water tanks located
underneath the floor, which could be accessed by opening up some four foot fifty
pounds aluminum diamond plated panels. They were ordinarily held in place by a dozen
screws, but it turned out that one of the panels was slightly ajar and
many of the screws were broken or missing. When a full search failed to
turn up any trace of Guida, the manager called the police to officially report
her missing at eleven twenty two pm. The authorities would focus their attention on
the loose panel in the basement, as the tank beneath it was thirty five
feet deep and one hundred feet in diameter and held a million gallons worth of
water. At around two am on February ninth, the police ordered the plant
to be shut down and began the process of draining the tank. Once all
the water was drained out, Gidah's radio and clipboard were discovered inside the empty
tank, but there was still no sign of her. A decision was made
to start draining the plant's other water tanks in case Geta's body had managed to
drift into one of them. Sure Enough, at around six thirty pm,
that evening, her body was discovered inside a tank known as the clear well,
which is the final storage space for filtered water after it has completed the
filtration and disinfection processes. The tank would be drained and the Passaic Valley Water
Commission issued a precautionary boil water order, a public health advisory which is sent
out when the community's drinking waters has been contaminated, as the order recommends that
residents boil their water in order to purify it. See, her death becomes
a trauma for the whole community. It's do you guys remember the what was
the hotel documentary inside the Cecil Hotel? Yeah, same kind of thing,
right where people are showering with the brown water and being told, well,
it's there, old pipes, it is what it is, and it wasn't.
It was the remains of the poor girl who had fallen into the yeah,
on the roof. And so it does. It becomes this kind of
trauma that's widespread across the community. In more ways, it's a physical trauma
for many people. But then you go back to the plant and you go
back to Gita, and I'm wondering it's in the two thousands, are there
not security cameras and things, because this had to take some time to unscrew
all of those screws. It had to make some noise to lift those heavy
steel panels. How did someone get away with this? Well, as we're
going to talk about, there were a lot of security cameras on the outside
of the plant, but security cameras inside were I don't think there were many
at all, and there certainly weren't any in the basement. And that was
one of the big issues here is that it was very difficult to get inside
the plant if it was unauthorized, but you could move around pretty freely,
So you can understand why someone could kill Gita and put her body in that
tank and somehow be able to do it without being noticed. An autopsy would
reveal that Gita was still alive when she first entered the water, so her
official cause of death was drowning. However, there were also a number of
deep bruises on Guita's neck to suggests that someone had attempted to strangle her,
as well as additional bruises on her waist and elbow to indicate she had been
involved in a violent struggle. It was suspected that someone had attacked and incapacitated
Gita in the plant's basement before removing one of the access panels, dumping her
body into the water tank, and hastily replacing the panel. There was a
five foot gap between the water and the panel, and since the tank was
not equipped with a ladder or any lighting, it would have been impossible for
Geda to climb out, even if she was still conscious. As a result
of these findings, the Passaic County Prosecutor's office announced that the case would be
investigated as a homicide. There was no sign of sexual assault on Gita's body,
and investigators believed that her killer did not use a weapon to attack her
and only strangled her with their bare hands. The temperature of the water inside
the tanks was only thirty six degrees fahrenheit, and since Ghita was believed to
be submerged in there for around thirty two hours, the heavy chlorine levels would
have corroded and eliminated any potential trace evidence that the perpetrator left behind, such
as DNA and fingerprints. Another issue is that since a number of other people
had walked through the basement tunnels in the hours following Gita's death, the potential
crime scene was compromised. In fact, even though the shards of broken glass
found near the panel seemed to be consistent with the beaker Geita had been carrying,
employees had swept them up and threw them away before the police arrived.
Even though the tank contained a censor which was designed to set off an alert
about changes with the water displacement, it happened to be broken at this time
and was not set off when Gheeta's body entered the water. Like I just
said, there were also no security cameras in the basement, and it contained
a lot of loud machinery which likely muffled any noise which may have been caused
by an attack on Yeta. It's almost as if the force was simply needed
to get her subdued and get her to the water taste, because I'm assuming
once you drop somebody down into that, there's really no way to get back
out, because there's there's no purpose for human entry into that, And so
I'm assuming this person attacks her violently, is strangling her so that she's not
making as much noise, she can't scream for help, those kinds of things,
and then possibly she passes out, and when they drop her down there,
even if there was access out, she wouldn't be able to It's interesting,
do you think signs of sexual assault could go away with the chemicals and
things like that, or it was thirty two hours she was submerged there,
would they really be able to tell those kinds of details. Wasn't that just
clear water though, Like it was the final stage, the clear well where
water would just stand. It wasn't being treated with chemicals at that point,
was it? It was just chlora. So they say the chlorine could eliminate
DNA and fingerprints belong to a third party, But I don't know if that
would have been strong enough to get rid of any sign of sexual assault.
I mean, if there was semen inside her body, that still would have
shown up, right, I guess yeah, yeah, And for me,
I don't think you would have enough time to do all of this and then
sexual abuse as well. It seems like they needed her gone. Someone who's
resentful of her position, someone who's resentful of someone who's an immigrant working and
being in a supervisory position, someone who doesn't like a woman being their boss.
Somebody had a problem with her and needed her gone, so I think
the purpose was just to eliminate her, and the bruising would be a sign
to subdue her and get her to a point where possibly unconscious, so they
could drop her in and there'd be no fight back. That's what I'm thinking
as well. And it's always been debated about whether this was a planned murder
or just a crime of passion where just someone something escalated out of control and
they didn't plan to kill Gita, but once they realized what they'd done,
they knew how to dispose her body. And I have a feeling that if
sexual assault had been the motive, they probably wouldn't have been risky enough to
do it in the plant's basement when anyone could have walked in at any time.
In a bizarre turn of events, just over one year before Gita's death,
the plant had been used as a filming location for an episode of the
TV series Law and Order Special Victims Unit. The episode, titled Brotherhood,
featured a scene in which the body of one of the characters was found floating
inside a water tank. In spite of this, investigators do not suspect that
the episode inspired Geita's death, and believed that the whole situation was nothing more
than an unfortunate coincidence. Since access to the plant was restricted, it seemed
very likely that one of Geta's coworkers may have been responsible for her death.
There was only one driveway to access the facility, and anyone who entered had
to check in at a manned security post, which was monitored by a camera
and had a ten foot high gate. Number of cameras and motion detectors surrounding
the perimeter, and the only section of the property which was not surrounded by
a fence was the south side of the Passaic River. While it would have
been very difficult for an outsider to enter the plant, security inside the facility
was not that tight, as none of the areas required access with a key
card and the employees could walk around freely anywhere. As a result, this
would make it difficult for investigators to track the movement for each employee and determine
which ones might have been in the basement during the time period that Guida was
killed. So I know that they're processing large amounts of water. This is
a very big plant. How many people would have been working there and on
her shift? I mean, are we talking hundreds of people. We talked
about ten people. How big is this pool of suspects? I was just
about to talk about that they had a total of eighty five employees, and
fifty of them happened to be working during the time period when Nigita went missing.
So yeah, like I said, security records showed that fifty of them
were present and working on the day Guida died. And while all of these
employees willingly provided DNA samples to police, this did not prove very useful since
all potential DNA evidence had been eradicated by the chlorine. When investigator started looking
into Geda's background, she was described as a very friendly, cheerful person who
generally had good relationships with her coworkers and management. However, there were some
coworkers who reportedly did not like her and were resentful of her promotion to senior
chemist. Even though Geda always downplayed her own academic achievements, there was apparently
some jealousy about her PhD. When this case was later featured in an article
in People magazine, an anonymous employee alleged that there was rachel prejudice towards Geta,
stating quote, ninety eight percent of the plant is white, and not
all of them like seeing immigrants do well end quote. I could definitely see
racism playing a role here. When you look at this, you you could
see resentment and jealousy, kind of insecurity with a woman who's immigrated here to
the United States. She is a high achieving woman with a solid family,
She's hard working, she has her PhD. That and of itself can be
threatening to people who just simply look at someone and they say, why her
right, why did she get this? And they almost cast this kind of
elitism on her, even though she's not necessarily carrying herself that way. And
so if someone said, I've been working here for years, she hasn't.
I've you know, been in this field for this long. How come she
got to jump ahead? I could see that. Plus someone who has a
anger and kind of a racist attitude, of course that's going to cause a
bigger fuel of anger. And Geita not only had her doctorate, but she
had like three master's degrees, isn't that right, Robin, Like she got
one at Loyola and then also her bachelor's and then when she immigrated to the
United States, she then got I think two more master's degrees. And her
PhD. Exactly, yeah, so, and she got a gold medal for
being the top student in her class at Loyola. So she already achieved really
high in India and only did better when she immigrated to the US to get
additional accomplishments. So she probably had better education and more accomplishments than nearly anybody
else working at that plant. And even though she was very humble about it,
she didn't like to brag. I could still see how there might be
some resentment from some of the more blue collar folks. Do you know what
percentage of the employees were women? They never actually said that. I mean,
we just gave the statistic that ninety eight percent were white, but I
don't have any information about how many other women worked there. But to hearken
back to the Sue Tuasco its case, like she was one of the only
women working at the airline at the time of her death, and there was
just so much resentment about her getting a promotion and being a supervisor to some
of these other men. And I could see the same thing happening with Geeta,
where not only is she a woman, but she's also an immigrant woman.
And I think there could have been some men there who had a problem
with that. My stepdad, for years, he just retired recently, worked
at a water treatment facility and it was a huge water treatment facility, state
of the art. And I can only say, I don't want to project
this onto this case because I don't know what the what the statistics are there,
how many women were employed. But I do know in his workplace,
I think the total people there that might have worked were maybe around fifty And
I also think that of that maybe there was one woman, maybe two.
And this is like a few years back, and maybe now there's more women
working there. But I do know it was definitely skewed way more towards men.
So I could say that in there was some strange politics that happened at
that place. If there was a woman who was in the highest position,
I would have thought, based on the way my stepdad described it, that
there would have been certain men there who would have been resentful of her position.
There was also tension about the plant's transition from chlorine treatments to an ozone
disinfection system, as some employees apparently did not agree with the initiative. In
the weeks prior to her death, a pinkish substance was found in some treated
water while Gita was outsick. Even though the issue was resolved in her absence,
it was not done according to the plant's protocol, so Gida would be
a signed to retrain some of her co workers. This did not go over
well with everyone, and some employees reportedly blamed Gida and the plant's knew ozone
cleansing process for the appearance of the pinkish substance. Her husband, Jia,
would state, quote, my wife told me the atmosphere was very hostile at
the time. There was friction end quote. However, investigators suspect did that
Gita's death was not a premeditated murder and could have been the result of a
workplace dispute which escalated out of control. I find it a little difficult to
say you could rule out a premeditated murder because I might have that in the
back of my head and when we get into a fuss, I go,
now's the time to take this woman out. So I don't know that you
can completely rule that out. But when you look at Gita, she is
a supervisor. She's one of the top people at this plan, and so
right here's case in point that when there's a problem she's gone, it gets
resolved, but when she gets back, she now has to go back and
basically get on to everyone and reteach them, retrain them. These are people
who feel like they are competent at their job, they do the right thing.
They don't like this new system. They've already voiced that they're frustrated with
it. There was a problem, and now one of the women instituting the
new system is going to sit them down and retrain them, which could feel
very belittling to them. They could be very resentful and upset with that.
And so I could see where those kinds of moments where she's either disciplining someone
or having to quote retrain people who might, in their own head think I
know all of this stuff. I don't need her especially to be retraining me.
I could see where that would create that kind of friction that her husband
described. Oh yeah, we're going to talk about this more in the episode.
But they did say that some of the employees who worked at that plant
were described as quote unquote old school, So it sounds like they liked the
old system, they didn't like these new changes. And if you bring in
this woman to retrain them and kind of throw everything for a loop. I
can see how that would create potential resentment. After spending a month interviewing all
of the plant's employees, police narrowed down the field of potential suspects to eight,
but after a year long investigation, it was announced that the number had
been narrowed down to three. While none of these three potential suspects were named
publicly, it was revealed that all of them were male and had been working
at the plant on the day was killed. It also turned out that one
of these suspects was a supervisor and one of the others was the lab technician
who would ask Gheeta to go down into the basement to calibrate the filters and
clarity sensors. But it must be noted that, according to plant records,
these instruments did need to be calibrated that day, so his story checked out.
According to Lieutenant James Wood, the chief homicide detective for the Passaic County
Prosecutor's Office, none of these three men had solid alibis, and he believed
that one of them was on the verge of confessing until he decided to lawyer
up and stop speaking. With the police. They reach asked to take light
detector tests, and while one of them refused to do so, one of
the men did wind up passing, and the other man's results were inconclusive.
There was just no conclusive evidence to implicate any of the three suspects, so
the investigation would reach a standstill until a theory started to form that Gheta's death
may have been an accident. Hmmm, I'm wondering about the bruises on our
body, because if you have marks of strangulation around your neck and you have
bruises on your waist in your arms, I don't really know how you could
say that's an accident. Maybe there's an explanation for the bruising around her neck,
but I'll wait to hear that when we talk about the three suspects.
I know that one man was in the right place at possibly the wrong time,
and it checks out with these sensors. How were the other two pulled
in? Had they had conflicts with her? What made the other two men
a suspect? I wish I had that information, but nothing has been released
about them publicly. I guess this could have been done so that they didn't
want the public figuring out their identities, so potentially falsely accusing them if they
didn't do anything. I mean, we do know that one of them,
this lab technician, was the same man who found the broken glass near the
spot where Gita went into the tank, but he didn't really do anything,
and nobody noticed she was missing for the next several hours. But it could
be, like I said, his story did check out. He did have
a reason to send Gieda down there, so you can't just assume that this
was some sort of elaborate setup and he lured her down there to kill her.
But because this investigation is so secret and we have other than knowing about
the lab technician, we have no information whatsoever about these three potential suspects and
what kind of motive they might have had to kill Gieda. Here's a quick
question, Robin. Okay, so we talked about this earlier, but I
just want to confirm. Did we say that her clipboard was found in one
of the water tanks and she was found in another. Let me just double
check that. I think her radio or something was found in the other tank.
Yeah. Yeah, the radio and the clipboard were found in the tank
beneath the panel where she had gone into, but they thought that her body
had floated to the other tank where she was eventually found. Okay, so
they were connected. It wasn't like I don't believe this was an accident due
to her injuries. But hypothetically, if she had fallen in the tank,
her clipboard could have been found in one and she could have floated to the
other. Yes, exactly. So they think that if she had fallen in
her items could remain behind, but she could have floated to the other place
where she was eventually found. Detectives would consult with Derek Pounder, a forensic
pathologist from the University of Dundee in Scotland who was considered to be an expert
in the field of drownings. Even though the bruising on Gita's neck suggested that
she'd been strangled, Pounder had an alternate explanation for them. He claimed there
were a few documented cases of drowning victims being found with similar bruising, which
had been caused by extremely cold water. According to Pounder, if Gita was
still conscious when she entered the water tank, the cold temperatures could have caused
her to go into shock. If her head and neck were above the water
while this was taking place. This may have led to hemorrhaging at the neckline,
which caused her bruises to form. During an article published in The New
York Post, an anonymous insider from the plant came up with a potential expert
nation for how Geda could have entered the water accidentally. According to this insider,
on the day of Gita's death, the state ordered some testing on the
water due to the appearance of a pinkish haze. Even though water samples could
be collected from the tanks with some newer machinery, there was apparently one water
quality supervisor who was described as very old school and still had a tendency to
take water from the tank manually. This would have involved removing a panel from
the floor of one of the basement corridors, so a potential theory is that
someone could have done this and left the scene without putting the panel back in
place. Since the corridors were dimly lit, it's possible that Gita unknowingly walked
over the opening in the floor and fell into the water tank, while when
the responsible party returned to the scene and put the panel back into position,
they may have been unaware that Gueda was inside the tank, or if they
did know, they decided to cover their tracks in order to avoid potential liability
issues. Well, believe eive it or not. After the lead homicide detective
James Wood retired, he stated during an interview that he had changed his mind
about the case and now believe the Gidah's death was an accident caused by negligence
rather than an intentional homicide. Question that there are not deaths where there was
bruising due to cold water, but it sounds very odd to me. It's
frustrating when you read this because any of these options, the option of someone
knowing she had fallen in there and covering it on purpose to avoid liability,
and or someone putting her there, those are both tragic situations. Someone who
came by and put the lid back on and screwed the floor back down partially,
that would be, you know, absolutely understandable. But the other two
explanations are both tragic. Right, someone knew and didn't help and didn't say
anything, let her sit there for thirty two hours, or someone murdered her.
I'm still leaning towards somebody hurt her. There was tension, there was
frustration with her. She had confided in her husband that there was stress at
work. And to me, the bruising around the neck is worrisome. I
need more information of how and why that bruising occurs with cold water. And
what could you say about the bruising around the waist If you're going to explain
the bruising because her neck was above water and that was like a contact point
and it caused the bruising due to the shock, how could you explain the
bruising at the waist? And let me ask you this too. When you
think about when you tread water, you don't sit in one location for minutes.
I mean, when you tread water, you're using your arms. You're
pushing your body up and down, up and down, up and down,
so the water is constantly moving across your neck and your shoulders, and eventually
you would get exhausted. But at that point I almost think only your head
would like the top of your face would be out, you know what I
mean. So around her neck, I can't imagine just treading water to my
neck is in the same position for long enough to bruise. It just seems
odd and by your logic, which makes total sense to me. If it
was going to bruise, like the University of Dundee guy said, then I
would think a Pounder that was his name, But I would think that it
would also be all the way up the neck, right, so you'd see
bruising through the length of a neck, because You're right, she'd be bobbing
up and down. So if that cold water and the shot caused bruising,
wouldn't you see that bruising like in multiple, multiple locations, multiple layers at
least. Yeah, like multiple layering where I could hold my body here and
then here and then here, and I got so tired I went under like
banded bruising. And another issue I have is that even though Pounder is considered
to be an expert in drownings, how many other drownings has he studied under
these exact circumstances, Because I'm guaranteeing that there's probably not too many other examples
of someone drowning after falling in a water tank and a plant, and they
talk about the circumstances that this was completely dark and she was something like five
feet below the opening, so it's kind of like drowning even if he has
found other documented cases of someone drowning with bruises on their neck. I'm willing
to bet that those other cases aren't anything like Geeta's, and so how could
he accurately predict what kind of bruising she's gonna get on her body when she's
in such unusual position. However, the biggest issue was that Derek Pounder's theory
was based on nothing more than guesswork, as he apparently did not view the
original autopsy report. He also couldnot examine Geta's body, as her family had
elected to cremate her in accordance with Hindu funeral customs. During the initial stages
of the investigation, Gita's body and autopsy report have been examined by no less
than five separate pathologists from Passaic County, and they all came to the same
conclusion that her death was a homicide. Geedah's family also did not agree with
the accident theory, noting that she was a very conscientious person with a reputation
for being a perfectionist, and they found it doubtful that she would have walked
through the basement corridor without noticing an open panel on the floor beneath her.
Her oldest daughter Pavritha, would state quote, I think he would have to
ignore a lot of facts to believe it was an accident end quote. For
their part, other plant employees claimed that they had never personally witnessed an incident
where someone removed a floor panel and left it open for an extended period of
time after leaving the scene. In two thousand and seven, the Angara family
would file a wrongful death lawsuit against the Passaic Valley Water Commission, alleging that
the plant had a history of safety violations which were never remedied. The suit
was tied up in litigation for two years before a state judge ordered the parties
to mediate for a potential settlement. But I'd been not able to find out
how this lawsuit ultimately turned out. In twenty fifteen, a tenth anniversary article
was published about Gitta's death, where John Ladaka, the former Passaic County Chief
Assistant prosecutor, confirmed that the three men considered to be potential suspects during the
early stages of the investigation, were no longer believed to be responsible. Ladaraki
stated quote, there were a couple of people who raised their antennas, but
when push came to shove, we looked into the additional things that became areas
of concern in interviewing these folks, and based on that we thought that while
there were reasons they came across as hinky, we ultimately didn't believe the actively
killed her end quote. At the moment, the case is described as quote
open but inactive. So there's still no answers about what caused the death of
Guita and Gara. So I guess you could say the path went Chiley.
I'm praying that her family was able to get some kind of financial compensation to
help with you know, they lost their mother and their matriarch and one of
the major breadwinners in their family, and you know, it's difficult to go
on as a widower and to have your little ones that you're trying to raise
on your own, and you've lost an income. So I think the financial
compensation that they were seeking, whether it was a murder or an accident,
means something of the lab had gone wrong, something that that plant had gone
wrong, and so I am praying to get financial compensation. However, we
all know that financial compensation doesn't help with the emotional loss of their mother and
wife, and so not having the answers. We talk about this all the
time. You could have given them fifty million dollars And I still want to
know what happened to her, How did this happen to her? Why weren't
things in place that would have prevented this from happening to her, or that
would have allowed us to have some kind of justice or understanding of how she
died. And so my heart is just so sad. She had three children
correct, yes, yeah, three little ones that she left behind that were
young. They needed their mom, and their mom's not going to be there
for any of their major life events. She worked so hard, she moved
herself here to create a better life so she could have those babies and she
could provide a life for them. And that's what she was doing, and
it was taken away. So, whether an accident or a murder, things
most likely could have been done better to help either the investigators figure out who
it was, or to keep the people, all people, not just her
that we're working in that plant much safer, are you guys? Just as
frustrated by the comments from John lotteraca how vague they are, where he says
that well, we have three potential suspects, but we don't believe they're responsible
now. But they don't provide any specific details why. They just essentially just
say, well, they looked suspicious at first, but we ultimately don't believe
that they killed her. But why, I mean, how do you know
that? Yeah, tell us, why how do you know that? And
like I said, the bruising and saying that that was all proof of an
accident, it's just not convincing enough for me to say, oh, okay,
that's good, thank you for updating us, and now we can all
go to sleep and rest easy. We don't have any information to go and
say, okay, now I'm confident that he's right. And we know that
people are pissed off about having to be retrained about this pinkish hued water,
and what is Geeda doing. She's going to get water as a sample to
test and figure out why this pink isshue is there. But as a result
of that whole situation, she has been put in a leadership role again,
tasked with doing this thing, which obviously a lot of the employees don't like.
They probably don't like it because she's a racial minority and the plant was
predominantly white, and because she's a woman, so I would think that tempers
could be potentially running hot at this exact time. So to rule out it
being a homicide and to say that, oh, yeah, very well,
could be an accident, I think like you said, Robin, and I
think was a really good point that Pounder, the probability is low that he's
ever investigated a death in water, that is, in conditions that are similar
to this, So it can be really difficult to say that, oh,
well, it happened in these other cases there was bruising, and we don't
know how many cases, and what the exact temperatures were of the water,
what was the position of the body, was the size of the person.
Was a woman, was it a man. There's so many different variables that
go into this, and to just kind of dismiss it and say that it
was an accident, it just seems so preposterous. That's why I'm hoping that
when a lot of Roco made those statements that he wasn't ruling out the suspects.
Based on Derek Pounder's conclusions, that he now thinks it's a homicide.
Because you remember their methods they said, well, we narrowed it down to
eight, and then we narrowed it down to these three. And I'm like,
well, if you don't think these three are responsible, then you should
start over because somebody in that plant had to kill her. So I can
understand that our family must be frustrated that there haven't been any new developments in
the investigation for over a decade now, So you're wondering are they reinvestigating these
people? Like what are exactly are they doing to try to figure out who
killed Gita? So I think this would be a good time to bring an
end to part one. But join us next week as we present part two
of our series about the unexplained death of Geta and Ghara. Robin, do
you want to tell us a little bit about the Trailment Cold Patreon. Yes,
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Music by Paul Rich from the podcast Cold Callers Comedy