A suburban Boston teenager accused of murdering his mother and brother used AI to search \u201cfor theoretical ideas or fantasy stories regarding the killing of his family,\u201d authorities said Wednesday.<\/p>\n
Arjun Aravind, 17, of the affluent bedroom community of Acton, was charged with two counts of murder in the slayings of Sudha Venkatesan, 45, and Siddharth Aravind, 14, according to a statement from Middlesex County prosecutors.<\/p>\n
The suspect\u2019s tutor, who had an appointment at the family home on Tuesday, \u201cwas unable to make contact with residents upon arrival,\u201d prosecutors said.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when the suspect\u2019s father \u2014 who had last spoken with his wife when he left for work in the morning \u2014 called police. Officers \u201clocated the two victims dead inside\u201d shortly after 6:30 p.m. ET, the district attorney said.<\/p>\n
The body of the suspect\u2019s brother was found on the first floor and the body of the mother in the basement, officials said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe investigation has so far shown that Arjun had recently been demonstrating some concerning behavior, including using the internet and ChatGPT to make searches for theoretical ideas or fantasy stories regarding the killing of his family,\u201d Middlesex County County DA Marian Ryan told reporters.<\/p>\n
The suspect planned out the death of family members as fantasy fiction, Ryan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was engaged in the use of ChatGPT in creating fantasy stories, kind of the gothic novel kind of stories, asking questions, creating characters, asking what about this if this happened to that, and they seem to appear to relate to threats to his family,\u201d she added.<\/p>\n
A rep for OpenAI, the San Francisco-based developer of ChatGPT, could not be immediately reached for comment on Thursday.<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t clear who was killed first.<\/p>\n
The suspect\u2019s father last saw Venkatesan between 6:30 a.m. and 7 a.m. before he went to work; the brother \u201cwent to a recreational facility\u201d at around 9 a.m. and returned home shortly after noon, the prosecutor said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an unspeakable tragedy,\u201d Ryan said. \u201cIt is an incredibly dark day. Obviously, an insurmountable tragedy for the dad in this case.\u201d<\/p>\n
The suspect and his mother\u2019s car, a 2014 green Honda Accord, were missing from the home when the bodies were found, officials said.<\/p>\n
An alarm was tripped at a parking lot, about 13 miles away in Wayland early Wednesday morning, officials said.<\/p>\n
Responding officers \u201crecognized that license plate and Arjun was inside that car,\u201d Ryan said.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe was taken into custody by police without incident,\u201d she added. <\/p>\n
The teen has been charged with two counts of murder, two counts of assault and battery on a household or family member, two counts of assault and battery, use of a vehicle without authority and theft of a motor vehicle.<\/p>\n
Local law enforcement knew the family from when the suspect was briefly reported missing last year.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was more of a runaway reported missing child at the time and there there wasn\u2019t much involvement after that,\u201d said Acton Police Chief Douglas Sturniolo, adding that there had been no threats of violence in that previous matter.<\/p>\n
It was not immediately clear on Thursday whether Arjun Aravind had hired or been assigned a criminal defense lawyer to speak on his behalf.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A suburban Boston teenager accused of murdering his mother and brother used AI to search \u201cfor theoretical ideas…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":812482,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-812481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812481"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812481\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/812482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}