A graduate student was arrested over the weekend after he told police that he had stabbed his childhood friend to death when he allegedly caught him "cheating" with his girlfriend after a night of drinking and birthday celebration.
“I walked in on my girlfriend cheating on me,” 24-year-old Rahul Gupta said, according to charging papers obtained by the Washington Post. “My girl and my buddy were cheating. My girl was cheating with my buddy. I walked in on them cheating and I killed my buddy.”
Just before 3:30 a.m. on Oct. 13, police were called to an apartment in Silver Spring, Md., just outside the nation's capital. There they found blood on the walls and 23-year-old Georgetown Law student Mark Edward Waugh unresponsive and "suffering from what appeared to be cutting wounds," according to a Montgomery County Police Department news release. Waugh was pronounced dead at the apartment.
Rahul Gupta, a biomedical engineering student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., who'd just turned 24 -- the friends had been out drinking to celebrate Gupta's birthday the night of the stabbing -- was found covered in blood, lying on the floor of the apartment, which by some accounts he lived in with the unnamed 23-year-old woman who called the police. (Other accounts have him spending a lot of time in the apartment; court records show Gupta with a Northern Virginia address.)
It's still unclear if Waugh and Gupta's girlfriend -- who told police that she didn't remember anything after the three did shots at the apartment, at the end of their evening out -- were in fact engaged in the activity that spurred the stabbing, an anonymous law enforcement official said.
“We’re still trying to piece together what happened in that apartment,” Montgomery County Police Capt. Jim Daly said to Gazette.net.
Nancy Waugh, the victim's mother, revealed to Gazette.net that Gupta and her son had been "best friends" since meeting at Langley High School in McLean, Va. “It’s just a shock. We can’t believe it."
"We're at a loss ourselves, trying to figure out ourselves at how to move forward without Mark," friend Bill Revillini told WJLA. "It's just unbelievable when it happens to someone you know."