Post by Joanna on Feb 8, 2015 15:45:14 GMT -5
Who Threw the Scientist into the Water Tank?
It was ink-black in the vast underground water tank. And biting cold. The only escape, a panel in the ceiling, loomed 5 feet above the water level, far too high to reach. Worse, there was no ladder. In this frigid subterranean cavern at the Passaic Valley Water Commission in Totowa, Geetha Angara – scientist, wife and mother of three – met her ghastly death 10 years ago today. Someone – probably a male co-worker – had wrapped his hands around the chemist's throat in a dank hallway above and squeezed until she passed out, then forced her through the hatch into the murk, authorities said at the time. In 36-degree water, she drowned.
The February 8, 2005, death drew attention far beyond the borders of New Jersey. It wasn't only that Angara died in nightmarish fashion or that it was a mystery detectives struggled to solve. Just four years removed from the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the incident raised broader concerns among residents and lawmakers about lax security in treatment plants and the safety of the nation's water supply. Gradually, press coverage tailed off. So did the investigation, with one detective voicing the opinion that Angara must have died accidentally.
Now, with the 10th anniversary at hand, the Holmdel woman's family members have called for the case to be reexamined and they have found an ally in state Senator Joe Kyrillos, who told NJ Advance Media last week he will ask the state Attorney General's Office to take a fresh look at evidence, witnesses and suspects. "It was a horrible, horrible case," said Kyrillos (R-Monmouth), who, along with other lawmakers, persuaded the state to review the investigation once before, in 2007. "A decade has now gone by since the murder and I'm happy to help put a spotlight on this," Kyrillos said. "So I'll be asking acting Attorney General John Hoffman to review this case, to find a way for his office to re-engage."
A spokesman for Hoffman said Friday his office had not yet heard from Kyrillos. The spokesman, Peter Aseltine, declined further comment, saying the Passaic County Prosecutor's Office remains the lead investigative agency. For the moment, that agency is no longer looking into Angara's death. Michael DeMarco, chief assistant prosecutor of the major crimes unit in Passaic County, described the probe as open but inactive. "If we were to discover any new evidence or have new information provided to us, of course we would make it an active investigation and pursue any leads," DeMarco said. He said he empathizes with the Angara family, adding that law enforcement officials want nothing more than to provide relatives with the answers they seek. "When a family does not have that arrest, that closure through the criminal justice system – through a trial or plea – it's very difficult, and we understand that," DeMarco said. "We share in that frustration when we have an unsolved homicide."
Angara's oldest daughter, Pavithra, was 19 when her mother died at age 43. Now a state deputy attorney general in the division of law, she argues it makes sense for investigators to revisit the case. "How do you get new information if you don't ask questions?" she said during an interview at the family's home. "Maybe once in a while you need to shake something to see what falls out. Things have changed at the plant over the years. Maybe someone who was scared to talk before is willing to talk now. I think it would be your due diligence to continue asking questions."
'Hostile' Work Environment. A native of Chennai, India, near the subcontinent's southeast coast, Geetha Angara earned a doctorate in organic chemistry at New York University before finding work at the water commission, an enormous industrial complex that provides drinking water to more than 800,000 people in 17 northern New Jersey communities. It was Angara's job to ensure the water was clean and safe and she took it seriously, former co-workers and family members said. In 2004, she was promoted to the position of senior chemist, charged with overseeing the plant's transformation into a cutting-edge facility that would eventually dispense with chlorine treatments in favor of an ozone disinfection system. "It was a very exciting time for her," said her husband, Jaya, a banker. "The ozone technology was just coming up at the time and she was taking the initiative in implementing it. She'd been promoted and had gotten her license to operate a plant. She was very happy."
Despite her personal satisfaction, Geetha Angara told her husband some employees in the facility were resentful of her promotion and disagreed with the decision to switch to the ozone cleansing process. In the weeks before his wife's death, Jaya Angara said, another employee blamed her when a pinkish material – seemingly associated with the ozone system – was discovered in treated water. "My wife told me the atmosphere was very hostile at the time," he said. "There was friction."
On the morning of Tuesday, February 8, Geetha Angara vanished. She had last been seen around 10:30 a.m., descending to the plant's lower level, a warren of narrow passages lined with large pipes. She carried a clipboard and glass beaker. A two-way radio was either in her pocket or clipped to her clothing. She was planning to calibrate instruments, a task she had conducted countless times, co-workers told investigators. Beneath her, interconnected tanks, 35-feet-deep, held 9 million gallons of purified water. These tanks had only one way in or out: rectangular 4-foot metal access plates, each weighing 50 pounds, set in the concrete floor.
It would be 12 hours before anyone noticed she was gone. A night-shift worker had spotted Angara's coat in her office and an uneaten sandwich on her desk. Three employees who had left for the day returned to the plant to search for her. In a lower-level passage, investigators would later say, one of these employees discovered broken glass on the floor, adjacent to an access panel that was slightly askew. The worker swept up the shards and discarded them in the trash. Eventually, the employees called police.
Divers discovered Angara's body 30 hours after she disappeared. It had migrated from one tank containing 1 million gallons of water into another. Below the hatch found askew, divers found the remains of the beaker and Angara's radio.
Had she fallen through the access hole while walking, perhaps distracted? There was a problem with this theory. The panel was almost closed. There was no way, investigators said, Angara could have fit through the opening.
A String of Dead Ends. It was a difficult investigation from the start. There were no cameras on the lower level to record what happened. The crime scene had been contaminated, first by plant employees, then by police officers and firefighters who aided in the search.
Immersed in corrosive chlorine for more than a day, Angara's body yielded no trace evidence, no DNA and no fingerprints, authorities said. But the body told a story nonetheless. Autopsy revealed deep bruises around Angara's neck. The medical examiner found more bruising on her waist and on one of her elbows, suggesting she fought as someone grabbed her, then throttled her into unconsciousness.
During the following weeks, former Passaic County Prosecutor James Avigliano said he believed Angara's attacker then pried open the access panel, pushed Angara through the hole and sealed her inside, replacing the panel haphazardly in a rush.
Jaya Angara said he tries not to think of his wife's final moments. They have haunted him for a decade already. "It was a brutal murder," he said. "A horrible incident."
Detectives interviewed every one of the plant's 85 employees and obtained DNA samples from the 50 who were at work that morning. Three employees gave investigators enough pause to be considered suspects, Avigliano said at the time. John Latoracca, the former chief assistant prosecutor in Passaic County and now a criminal defense attorney in Rutherford, said detectives worked the suspects exhaustively. "There were a couple of people who raised their [investigators'] antennas," Latoracca said. "But when push came to shove, we looked into the additional things that became areas of concern in interviewing these folks, and based on that, we thought that while there were reasons they came across as hinky, we ultimately didn't believe they actively killed her."
To make sure they hadn't missed anything, authorities asked the Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Protection to examine the plant's records for any anomaly. They found nothing.
In 2006, an EPA dive team spent hours in the tank where Angara died, searching the floor for evidence that might have escaped the attention of the divers searching for Angara a year earlier. Again, nothing.
Avigliano, the former prosecutor, even asked his team to look into a 37-year-old murder – the vicious slaying of a secretary at the Hoffman-La Roche plant in Clifton – because like Angara's killing, it was committed in isolation, on a weekend when the office was empty. Avigliano wanted to see if he could learn from that investigation. There was also the remote chance that someone who worked on the Hoffman-La Roche campus in 1968 later became an employee of the water commission. Like every lead, it came to a dead end.
Frustrated, the Angara family pushed for the Attorney General's Office to take over the investigation, enlisting the help of Kyrillos and other legislators, including former Rep. Rush Holt (D-12th Dist.) and Assemblyman Upendra Chivukula (D-Somerset). In 2007, the state agreed to review the case, though it did not reinvestigate every aspect, Latoracca said. That probe, too, went silent.
A year later, the retired lead investigator for the prosecutor's office, Lt. James Wood, told The Star-Ledger he had come to believe Angara's death, while tragic, was an accident. "There's absolutely no question in my mind," he said, citing the work of a Scottish pathologist who found that in certain cold-water drownings, bruising around the neck is similar to the injuries found in strangulation.
Latoracca has his own nagging doubt, but he won't go that far. Five pathologists reviewed Angara's autopsy report. All concluded it was a homicide. "It wasn't just one medical examiner. It was multiple medical examiners," Latoracca said. "Who am I to say these folks are wrong about a field I don't know a heck of a lot about?" At the same time, he said, "I can certainly see why Lt. Wood and most of the other guys on the job thought it was an accident." At the very least, he added, someone sealed Angara inside that tank. "Somebody in that place has some kind of responsibility," the former prosecutor said. "Either someone committed a homicide or someone forgot to replace that plate after opening it and now has this woman's death on their hands by negligence." No one, he said, admitted moving the panel back atop the hole.
A Daughter's Wish. Jaya Angara contends authorities must go all in one way or the other. Either persuade the pathologists they made a mistake, or investigate in the certainty it was a homicide.
Pavithra Angara rejects the idea that it was an accident outright. She called her mother an exceedingly careful woman. Moreover, she said, it would be almost impossible to miss a black, 4-foot hole in the ground. "I think you would have to ignore a lot of facts to believe it was an accident," she said.
In the years since her mother's death, she has come to fill the role Geetha Angara once played, helping to care for her brother, Vivek, 23, and younger sister, Priya, 19, a sophomore at Rutgers University. Pavithra Angara said it was her mother who planted the seed that she pursue a legal career, a first in a family filled with medical professionals. Now, as a government lawyer policing the state's professional boards, bringing actions against doctors, nurses, pharmacists and others deemed a threat to the public, she has a finely honed sense of justice. It is justice, she says, that she wants for her mother.
Source: Mark Mueller, New Jersey Online, February 8, 2015.
