A 40-year-old ex-pediatrician used a knotted bedsheet to hang herself from the skylight of her Upper Manhattan apartment Wednesday — three years after her release from prison for killing her abusive mother in Ohio.
The woman, Malar Balasubramanian, left several suicide notes behind, including for her roommate, to whom she apologized for hanging herself in their West 144th Street kitchen, law enforcement sources told The Post.
Back in 2005, Balasubramanian had admittedly spiked her mother’s milkshake with Xanex and strangled her dead in the town of Blue Ash near Cincinnati, leaving the corpse in the back seat of a car, according to news reports.
Two days after the mother’s murder, Balasubramanian, who was 29 at the time, was found near death on a nearby roadside. She had cut her wrists and downed two bottles of wine and more than two dozen tranquilizer pills, news reports said.
“Very sorry to have done this to you,” she told her adult brother and sister in a suicide note back then.
“Once I realized that I won’t succeed the way I wanted to in life and decided to end it, I realized that I couldn’t leave you two alone with Amma (mother),” Balasubramanian wrote her siblings.
“I’m sorry for what I did to Amma. I am,” that note continued. “But I’m glad she’s not here to hurt us anymore.”
After surviving that suicide attempt, Balasubramanian, who was then a practicing pediatrician, took a plea deal in her mother’s murder and was released from prison in 2012.
She had moved to New York for graduate school, her lawyer said.
“She was a lovely woman who was continually fighting mental illness,” lawyer Martin Pinales said Thursday of Balasubramanian.
Pinales had represented her back in 2005, fighting to get her a reduced sentence and early release.
“Her mother was a very domineering woman who controlled the family and used to tie the children up downstairs in the basement,” Pinales told The Post.
“The mother suffered from mental illness. It was horrible.”
During her prison term, Balasubramanian worked setting up recycling and gardening programs that were so successful, they were “adopted by prisons around the country,” he added.
“She was a remarkable woman.”
Additional reporting by Jamie Schram, Nick Fugallo and Laura Italiano