Before search parties began looking for a missing three-year-old girl in Texas earlier this month, and before her father changed his story about how she went missing, Sherin Mathews was a happy, cheerful child at an orphanage in India.
“We loved her laughter,” Babita Kumari, who managed the Mother Teresa Orphanage and Children’s Home in the city of Nalanda in eastern India’s Bihar state, told the Associated Press Thursday. Sherin had lived at the orphanage since she was an infant, and at the time was named Saraswati, after the Hindu goddess of wisdom.
“She was a smart child,” Kumari said.
So Kumari was puzzled when she heard what happened to the toddler — how her father, Wesley Mathews, who adopted her last year, was jailed after telling police Sherin choked to death drinking milk in the middle of the night. How Mathews told police Sherin needed to have meals at odd hours as part of a special diet, because she was malnourished.
“Look at the photos of the child. Does she look malnourished?” Kumari asked.
“I have so many questions about what happened to her,” she said.
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Mathews had reported his daughter missing Oct. 7, after he said he sent her alone into an alley near their Richardson, Tex. home as punishment for refusing to drink her milk. It was a narrative that transfixed the Dallas community and those in India with its unanswered questions — such as why Mathews waited several hours to report her disappearance, or why there were such few clues as to where she might have gone.
Then, more than two weeks later and not long after authorities said they had “most likely” found the girl’s body, police said Mathews “voluntarily arrived at the Richardson Police Station with his attorney and asked to speak with detectives.” This time, he told police that he had been “trying to get the 3-year-old girl to drink her milk in the garage” but she wouldn't listen to him, according to his arrest affidavit.
At that point, Mathews said he “physically assisted” Sherin in drinking her milk and that the girl choked on the drink.
“She was coughing and her breathing slowed. Eventually, Wesley Mathews no longer felt a pulse on the child and believed she had died,” the affidavit said. He told police he then removed her body from the home.
On Tuesday, police said they used dental records to confirm the body was Sherin’s. Her body was discovered by officers and search dogs examining a culvert near Spring Valley and Bowser roads, less than a mile from the family’s home in the suburb of 100,000 about 15 miles north of Dallas.
A cause of death hasn’t been determined and autopsy results haven’t been released.
Wesley Mathews told police his daughter had developmental disabilities and a special diet regimen where she had to eat whenever she was awake to gain weight.
But the child apparently had already been eating solid food and drinking milk from a cup when she left the orphanage, Kumari told the Associated Press. She said Sherin squinted in one eye, but was otherwise fine when Wesley and Sini Mathews adopted her in June 2016.
“Why did they have to make her eat or drink anything at that hour? Why was he forcing her?” Kumari asked. “If someone is forcing a drink into the mouth of someone who is crying and sobbing, then even an adult can choke.”
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Mathews’ attorney, Rafael De La Garza, did not immediately respond to The Washington Post's requests for comment Friday. Mitch Nolte, an attorney representing the girl’s mother, Sini Mathews, said in a statement earlier this week that the mother wasn’t involved in Sherin’s death or the removal of her body, and wants privacy to mourn her child.
India's foreign minister Sushma Swaraj tweeted Friday that she's asked the Ministry of Women and Child Development, which oversees adoption, to investigate Sherin's adoption. Passports for children adopted from India will now only be issued with the ministry's approval, she said.
Swaraj also tweeted that she's asked the Consulate General of India in Houston to investigate the child's death.
I have also asked Shri Anupam Ray @cgihou to ensure that the murder of Baby Saraswati @ Sherin Mathews is taken to a logical conclusion.
— Sushma Swaraj (@SushmaSwaraj) October 27, 2017
Between April 2016 and March of this year, 3,210 children were adopted in India and just 578 Indian children were adopted from outside the country, according to the Ministry of Women and Child Development.
A spokeswoman for Holt International, a U.S. adoption agency that facilitates hundreds of foreign adoptions each year, told the Associated Press that the agency by law cannot discuss specific adoptions or confirm whether it facilitated Sherin's adoption. She said the agency follows all national and international guidelines and requirements for adoptions, which are very specific for each country.
India requires quarterly post-placement reports in the first year of a child's adoption, and then two reports a year for the second year, according to the U.S. State Department. Holt International's website said the agency complies with those requirements.
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Sherin was sent to the orphanage in Nalanda by child welfare authorities when she was just a few months old. The orphanage has since been shut down, Kumari said, because of missing paperwork. The orphanage plans to challenge the shutdown, she said.
Kumari said the Mathews' didn't raise any red flags at the orphanage when they adopted Sherin. After their first visit with the girl, they called frequently from the United States, wanting to hear her voice. They seemed to love her, Kumari said.
“I will always want to know what happened to this child. What was the real reason she passed away,” Kumari said.
“If we had known this would happen to her, we would never have sent her.”
Earlier Monday, before Mathews turned himself in, he and his wife, Sini, attended a court hearing to determine whether they could regain custody of their biological daughter, Sherin's 4-year-old sister. She had been taken into custody by Child Protective Services and placed in foster care after Sherin was reported missing.
The judge postponed the hearing until Nov. 13 to give Mathews time to hire a civil attorney, a spokeswoman for CPS told the Associated Press.
“We do have the names of some relatives who have expressed interest in taking care of her,” said the spokeswoman, Marissa Gonzales. “We can begin looking into those relatives, but it is entirely up to the judge where she is placed.”
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