An American woman was found chained to a tree in a forest in Sindhudurg district, Maharashtra, India. Lalita Kayi Kumar, 50, was found by Sindhudurg police. A local pastor who heard the woman's screams alerted the authorities. According to a written note, her husband had left her there.
According to Indian police, the woman had been without food for several days and was in a serious condition in the town of Sonurli, about 450 kilometers (280 miles) from Mumbai. Kumar was carrying a copy of his U.S. passport and Indian documentation at the time of discovery. Authorities rushed her to a hospital in Sindhudurg and later to the Institute of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Goa Medical College and Hospital, where she was diagnosed with some form of mental illness, later confirmed as schizophrenia.
Once rescued, the woman wrote a note to contact police and health workers. “Injection due to extreme psychosis that caused severe jaw lock and inability to drink water. Need for intravenous feeding. 40 days without food or water. “The man tied me to a tree in the forest and said I would die there,” read the note seen in footage broadcast by India Today, where the woman wrote, accompanied by doctors.
Authorities have presented it as an attempted murder of her husband, according to statements obtained by CBS News from the police inspector in charge of the investigation, Vikas Badave.
Badave claims that they registered the case on July 31. The inspector, in turn, claims that police forces from Maharashtra are searching for her husband in Tamil Nadu. Authorities have not been able to obtain a statement from Kumar, but according to the hospital health services, the woman is in “better condition”.
According to the television network NDTV, the man is a resident of Tamil Nadu and the woman has been living in India for ten years. On the other hand, according to the statements collected by the network, one of the documents he had with him was his expired US visa.