Former Masterchef India finalist, Kothari Garima, 35, was murdered by her boyfriend in their shared apartment in New Jersey.
Kothari, who was five months pregnant, was found with upper body trauma and was found unresponsive in her apartment in New Jersey on Sunday.
The police reached the site of murder after they retrieved Manmohan Mall’s body in the Hudson River near Montgomery Street at around 7 am. Mall was 37-year investment banker working at the Deutsche Bank.
Both of the bodies were handed over to the medical examiner’s office and Garima’s death was labelled as homicide.
The Hudson county prosecutor reported that this looks like a case of Murder-Suicide. The authorities are still investigating the reason behind Mall’s death.
Following being on Masterchef India, Garima pursued a course as pastry chef at Le Cordon Bleu Paris in France. She is known to have hosted events for popular figures like Clinton family, Sarah Jessica Parker, Cher, Deepak Chopra and Melinda Gates.
Garima also opened her own Indian restaurant Nukkad on Greene Street in the Paulus neighbourhood in New Jersey. She had to close down her restaurant because of the covid-19 pandemic.
She moved to the United States a few years after her boyfriend, Mall, who emigrated to the country 10 years ago to complete his master’s degree from Columbia University.
Even after closing down her restaurant, just a week ago she decided to start offering delivery services to support her staff. She also accused some of the large companies taking advantage of the loans in the $2 trillion stimulus package that was meant for the smaller businesses.
Both the Prosecutor’s Office Homicide Unit and the Jersey City Police Department are currently investigating the murders for further insights on what happened.
