A New York oncologist fatally shot her baby and then herself Saturday morning in their home, state police reported. The incident happened in Somers, about 25 miles north of White Plains.
Dr. Krystal Cascetta, 40, entered her baby’s room in their home at about 7 a.m., shot the baby and then herself, according to a press release issued by state police. The baby’s gender and age were not provided, but an online baby registry suggests the baby was about 4 1/2 months old.
Law enforcement sources told The Journal News/lohud, part of the USA TODAY network, that the baby was a girl and an only child. They said that Cascetta’s husband, Timothy Talty, was away and Cascetta’s parents were in the house at the time of the shooting.
Cascetta was site chief of the Mount Sinai Queens Infusion Center, a treatment center for cancer and blood disorders, and was an assistant professor of hematology and oncology at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine.
Cascetta and Talty, who married in 2019, purchased the home on Granite Springs Road in 2021. The couple had previously lived in Brooklyn.
Cascetta’s husband is the founder of a line of protein bars that Cascetta endorsed. A bio of her on the Talty Bars website described how she had always planned to be a doctor and that she began focusing on oncology while in middle school after a friend of her mother’s died of breast cancer.
A graduate of Albany Medical College, she was inducted into its Gold Humanism Honor Society, which recognizes excellence in humanistic clinical care, leadership, compassion and dedication to service, according to her Mount Sinai bio.
Postpartum depression may affect about 1 in every 7 women, according to the National Institutes of Health. It is a form of major depression that may take hold at the beginning of pregnancy or within four weeks of giving birth.
Postpartum psychosis is an even more rare and severe condition than postpartum depression. Fewer than 5% of new moms experiencing postpartum psychosis engage in violent behavior such as infanticide, according to Postpartum Support International, a nonprofit organization educating the emotional changes in women during pregnancy and after pregnancy.
Symptoms of postpartum psychosis can include feeling confused and lost, having obsessive thoughts about your baby, hallucinating or having delusions, sleep problems, paranoia and, at its most severe, making attempts to harm yourself or your baby. It can lead to life-threatening thoughts or behaviors and requires immediate treatment.
In other news – Bill Cosby hit with a new lawsuit from a singer claiming he drugged and r@ped her
Bill Cosby faces a new lawsuit against him from a singer who claims that the comedian drugged and raped her in the late 1980s.
According to paperwork filed under the Adult Survivors Act that was seen by PEOPLE, plaintiff Morganne Picard accused Cosby, 86, of inviting the aspiring musician to the set of The Cosby Show in 1987, when she alleged that he “insisted and encouraged” her to drink beverages that made her feel “extremely intoxicated” on “multiple occasions” between then and 1990. Read More
