This is an example of how some people never really escape their past. About ten o'clock in the morning of the 27th, pediatrician Balar Balasubramanian of the Blue Ash section of Cincinnati, Ohio, was discovered by a passing motorist on McKinley Road. She was half naked, and seemed to be pretty much out of it when approached by police. She informed them there was somebody in the trunk of a car on Glendale Milford Road that needed help. They found the car, a 1998 Oldsmobile Intrique, and in the trunk they found the body of Balar's mother Saraja. She explained that she had initially tried to suffocate her mother, then fed her a milkshake laced with a lethal dose of medication. When this too failed to accomplish the task, she got her mother down on the floor and strangled her. Once she was dead, Balar dragged her mother to the trunk of the car with a makeshift raft made of bags of mulch she kept in her garage. She did this, she explained, not only for herself, but for her siblings, in order that her mother could no longer "hurt us". She went on to say she was sorry for what she did to her mother, but she had come to realize that she would never be a success because of of her.
Balar was a pediatrician who had in June 2004 finished a residency at the Childrens Hospital in Pittsburgh. She had spent the past year as a doctor in India. She woas soon to have moved to St. Louis to begin a cardiology fellowship.
Police had no explanation as to what may have occurred between the time Balar murdered her mother and the time she was found, half-naked and disoriented, at ten in the morning. It was obviously an emotional collapse of the most serious order, and there seemed to have been evidence she may have attempted suicide, due to the presence of a cut on her wrist.
Whatever the case, it's interesting to note that this woman had obviously sufferred some kind of serious traumatic disorder for quite some time, and may have felt, rightly or wrongly, that she was the victim of childhood abuse at the hands of her mother. Interesting also as to how this might have affected her career choices. To become a pediatrician would seem a logical route for one who has sufferred from abuse at the hands of a parent, even if that abuse was simple neglect. However it may have evolved, or how it began, it obviously culminated in the horrific series of events that to all intents and purposes, ended not just one life, but two.
