A man from Bellevue, Washington, appeared in court this week to face murder and domestic violence charges in connection with the death of his wife. The case, which stretches back to October of last year, is being treated as a domestic violence matter because the person who died was his wife, according to the details laid out in court documents.
Originally, the event drew little news coverage because it appeared the woman may have died of some kind of medical cause. According to the account given to police, officers received a call after the woman was found unresponsive behind a locked bathroom door. Her husband told them he had come home from work and could not get inside.
Officers forced entry, pulled the woman out and began life-saving measures, but she eventually died. The husband told them she had a history of panic attacks and some gastric issues, and that she had gone to the hospital earlier that month, suggesting her collapse was likely tied to that. Investigators initially had no immediate reason to suspect otherwise.
The picture changed after an autopsy. The medical examiner determined the manner of death was homicide, noting that contusions had begun to form on the woman's neck. That finding set off alarm bells for investigators, who also considered it unusual that the husband had called the medical examiner's office about the autopsy repeatedly, four times in total, according to court documents.
As detectives challenged his account of how the day unfolded, they asked him point blank whether he had killed his wife. He is quoted as denying it. Investigators then examined his phone and messaging apps, and say they uncovered a romantic relationship with another woman, someone he had wanted to marry about a year earlier before the families would not allow it, which led instead to an arranged marriage.
According to investigators, the wife who died had lived with him for only about three months. They also determined that the other woman had attended his wedding just a few months before the wife's death, and that there had been phone calls and video messages exchanged between the two close to the time she died, including on the day of what investigators are calling a murder.
In their investigative notes, detectives wrote that the accused, named in the documents as Avinash Narnay, had a motive to kill his wife, whom he likely saw as an obstacle to being with the other woman. He is now being held in prison facing a number of charges, and the case is expected to continue developing as more information emerges.