CARY N.C. (Diya TV) — A 17-year-old Indian-American teenager has been arrested, accused of killing his mother, a rare case from a community which boasts of family bonding and higher academic achievement.
Police in North Carolina arrested Arnav Uppalapati, 17, on Friday, more than a year after the slaying of his mother, Nalini Tellaprolu. The 51-year-old was found strangled to death in her upscale home in Wake County, where she worked at the Duke University Medical Center.
Authorities are yet to release a motive in the killing, and have not said yet what evidence led them to the arrest of her teenage son. The investigation ultimately took a year before an arrest was made.
Uppalapati was 16 when his mother was killed, police said he dialed 9-1-1 on the afternoon of Dec. 17 2015 and told the dispatcher he arrived home from school to find his mother dead lying on the garage floor. His father, who was away on a business trip, had been trying to reach his wife all day to no avail, and asked Uppalapati to get home to check on her.
When police arrived at the home, they found Tellaprolu strangled to death with a bag over her head, her feet inside the back seat of the family’s car in the garage.
Uppalapati told police he’d last seen his mother alive the previous evening when the two ate dinner together. He said he woke the next morning shortly before 7 am, eating breakfast and leaving the house before getting a chance to see her that final day. The medical examiner’s office, which said Tellaprolu’s body was battered and bruised, including with a fractured neck, when they received it, ruled the death a homicide.
“It’s very devastating,” Satish Garimella, a Morrisville town councilman of Indian descent, told local media outlets. “There’s never been an incident where a son has taken the life of his own biological mother.”
It did not appear the home was targeted for robbery. The alarm system had not been activated, and there were no signs of forced entry. Police say nothing had been removed from the home during the crime, according to search warrant applications.
In the days after Tellaprolu’s death, investigators searched a 2013 Honda Civic she drove and the family home and reviewed the home’s alarm system records.
Arnav Uppalapati’s arrest marked the second time this month that a teen has been charged with killing his mother. On March 6, Franklin County sheriff’s deputies charged Oscar Funez Machado, 18, with first-degree murder, after the sheriff said he decapitated his mother, Yesenia Funes Beatriz Machado.
