Kuntal Patel was inspired by watching ‘Breaking Bad’.
By The American Bazaar Staff
WASHINGTON, DC: A London-based Indian-origin graphic designer Kuntal Patel, 37, accused of trying to kill her mother Meena by spiking her Diet Coke with the deadly poison abrin, admitted in court there that she thought of killing her mother and committing suicide after she was beaten and slapped during a violent row.
Patel told jurors she had felt like an ‘overweight buffalo’ and never had a boyfriend before she fell in love with a man, Niraj Kakad, an IT worker based in Arizona, who she met through the marriage website shaadi.com, reported the Daily Mail.
But after she was forced to call off the wedding, Patel said she had hit ‘rock bottom’ and considered killing herself and her 60-year-old magistrate mother.
“I was having thoughts about killing myself, and I have to tell you that I also had thoughts – and I can’t believe I’m going to say this – about killing my mother,” she told Southwark Crown Court. “I know it’s a terrible thing and I feel ashamed for having those thoughts. I was in a really bad mental state of mind. I couldn’t cope. I was researching these websites constantly to the point where I became obsessed with doing research on it. It was all I thought about.”
Patel, who worked for Barclays in Canary Wharf, lived with her mother and sister in Plaistow, East London, and was from a strict Gujarati background, said the report.
Her mother kept tabs on her movements ‘24/7’ and was ‘controlling’ towards her daughters. Patel said she was unhappy about her looks and had confided to a friend that she felt like an ‘overweight buffalo’ and had never had a boyfriend. She turned to Shaadi.com to find a man she could marry and have children with.
She met IT worker Niraj Kakad, from Arizona, US, and the pair made plans to marry. But her mother, who sits on the bench at Thames Magistrates’ Court, did not accept him and allegedly called him a ‘fat, black b******’ and her daughter a ‘f*****-up-brain girl who can’t be my blood’ for falling for him, the Mail report said.
Gawker reported that when Patel told her mother Kakad had described her as controlling, she erupted in fury and beat her. She said: “I think for her that was a sign of him being disrespectful to her.” Patel said her mother “started slapping” her “on and off.”
Previously, the court heard that Patel had written, “I wish I was dead or my mum dies I hate her so much,” in an email to a friend about the abuse—which also included shouting, curfews and constant check-ins, and beatings that left bruises on Patel’s arm, she said.
Last December, she allegedly bought abrin off the ‘dark web’ and slipped it into her mother’s drink. But her mother survived, said the Mail report.
Patel told the court she became ‘addicted’ to the hit US series Breaking Bad in which one of the characters is killed off with the poison ricin. Patel, however, denies trying to murder her mother and acquiring a biological agent or toxin.
When asked in court what effect the poison took in the Breaking Bad episode, Patel said, “Just a painless death – that was in the program.”