Daijiworld Media Network - Washington
Washington, Jun 20: Indian-American author Kavvya Vishwanathan's parents were killed in a plane crash at Ohio shortly after take-off on Sunday.
The doctor couple, Viswanathan Rajaraman and Mary J Sundaram were attempting to take off from Rickenbacker International Airport in Columbus just before 9 am, sources said.
Rajaraman, a leading New Jersey neurosurgeon, and his wife were returning to Essex County Airport in Fairfield.
The cause behind the plane crash is still not known. The Federal Aviation Administration sent investigators to the scene, but the National Transportation Safety Board will lead the probe.
Rajaraman was co-chief of neuro-oncology at Hackensack University Medical Centre's cancer centre. Sundaram was also a physician, but stopped practicing to raise the couple's daughter, Kaavya Viswanathan, who is now 24.
The couple hail from Chennai. They spent some time in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States in the mid-1990s.
Kaavya Viswanathan made news in 2006 as a Harvard undergraduate when she published the novel "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," a story she wrote in high school. The book made the New York Times bestsellers list.
But she was accused of plagiarism shortly after publication and copies of her book were pulled from stores and destroyed by her publisher.
With IANS Inputs