Caregiver of Indian girl found dead in Texas seeks answers
The toddler was cheerful, healthy and eating well and her prospective parents eager to hear her voice a year ago, the manager of the Indian orphanage where Sherin Mathews was adopted remembers. So she wants answers about what happened before the girl’s body was found in a Texas culvert and her father was jailed, allegedly telling police the 3-yearold needed a special diet and choked to death on milk.
The claim that Sherin was malnourished and needed to eat at odd hours puzzles Babita Kumari, who managed the orphanage in eastern India where the girl had lived since infancy. “Look at the photos of the child. Does she look malnourished?” Kumari said during a phone interview with The Associated Press.
“I have so many questions about what happened to her,” Kumari said.
The girl then named Saraswati, after the Hindu goddess of wisdom, was a happy, cheerful child who made everyone smile at the Mother Teresa Orphanage and Children’s Home in the city of Nalanda in eastern India’s Bihar state.
“We loved her laughter,” Kumari said. “She was a smart child.”
Sherin’s body was found by cadaver dogs in a culvert under a road in suburban Dallas on Sunday after her father reported her missing on Oct. 7. Wesley Mathews is being held on $1 million bond on a charge of felony injury to a child. A cause of death hasn’t been determined, and an autopsy hasn’t been released.
Mathews told police his daughter had developmental disabilities and was malnourished. The couple described a special diet regimen in order to help her gain weight.
According to an arrest affidavit filed by Richardson police, Wesley Mathews said he had been trying to get the girl to drink her milk in the garage.
“Eventually the 3-year-old girl began to drink the milk. Wesley Mathews then physically assisted the 3-year-old girl in drinking the milk,” according to the affidavit.
Mathews told police that Sherin began to choke and cough and eventually he felt no pulse and believed the child had died. Investigators wrote that he “then admitted to removing the body