Cognizant Employee Wanted in Delaware Motel Murder Found Dead in New Jersey
This is a retelling, in our own words, of the story reported by the Delaware News Journal in June 2012. Both of the people at its center died that week; the details below are from the contemporaneous reporting.
On the morning of June 18, 2012, a chambermaid found the body of Danielle Mehlman, 26, of Bensalem, Pennsylvania, in a room at the Atlantic Oceanside Motel in Dewey Beach, Delaware. She had been stabbed several times. The resort town's mayor said it was Dewey Beach's first homicide since it incorporated 31 years earlier.
Hours before her death, Mehlman had been at a Dewey Beach bar, Jimmy's Grill, with Pawan Kumar Anjaiah, 26 — a software engineer from Karnataka who was in the United States on an assignment with the IT firm Cognizant. Two people who spent the evening with the pair told the News Journal that Mehlman and Kumar had known each other only a short time, perhaps a week. They had drinks; one of the companions described the two showing no visible tension, though Mehlman was said to have made clear to others that the relationship was not a romantic one.
Delaware State Police obtained arrest warrants charging Anjaiah with first-degree murder and possession of a deadly weapon, and released a surveillance photo of him at a grocery store. The search ended about 24 hours after Mehlman's body was found: Anjaiah was found dead in a motor lodge in Belleville, New Jersey. A spokeswoman for the Essex County prosecutor's office said he had died of an apparent drug overdose, and described it as a suicide.
Mehlman left behind a 4-year-old son. Her former boyfriend, who had taken their son for Father's Day on June 17, said she never showed for the planned return the following day.
Cognizant later said the funeral home had received Anjaiah's body from the Medical Examiner's office and was working with the Indian Consulate in New York to ship it home to Tumkur, Karnataka.
Based on reporting by the Delaware News Journal (June 2012) and contemporaneous Indian press coverage of the case.
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