Doctor Pleads Not Guilty in Colleague’s Death

A neonatologist at Huntington Memorial Hospital was charged with murder Monday for allegedly strangling a pediatrician with whom he worked, placing her body in a car, and then pushing the vehicle off a cliff to make it look like an accident, officials said.

Dr. Kevin Paul Anderson, 40, pleaded not guilty Monday afternoon to the murder of Dr. Deepti Gupta, 33, and was held on $1-million bail. He is expected back in Glendale Municipal Court on Nov. 29 for a preliminary hearing.

In a statement, the district attorney’s office said preliminary evidence showed that Gupta was strangled.

Anderson was arrested Thursday night after a witness reported seeing him push Gupta’s car off the Angeles Crest Highway into a steep canyon north of La Canada-Flintridge.

Anderson told sheriff’s investigators that he and Gupta drove to the mountains to talk about a private practice they had planned to start, but that she had decided to back out of, officials said.

He allegedly told detectives that during a heated argument in his car, he strangled Gupta, placed the body in her car and pushed it over the side of the rocky escarpment. Her body was found thrown from her vehicle, 270 feet below the highway.

Anderson did not explain why he and Gupta would drive separate cars into the mountains to discuss business, sheriff’s officials said. Also, one county official said that the victim’s body temperature was so low when she was found that she must have died more than eight hours earlier. The Los Angeles County coroner’s office has not released the time or cause of death.

Gupta, of Glendale, was a well-liked pediatrician who recently finished her residency and was married to a UCLA mechanical engineering professor. She had a 2-year-old daughter.

Anderson, of La Verne, is also married and has a child.