An Oklahoma medical doctor is accused of travelling to South Florida and staging the death of her 4-year-old daughter to make it appear the child drowned in the swimming pool at their rented vacation home in the middle of the night, detectives say. Dr. Neha Gupta, a 36-year-old pediatrician, was booked into the Oklahoma County Jail in Oklahoma City on Tuesday. She is accused of first-degree murder in Miami-Dade County, an arrest warrant states.

Gupta "attempted to conceal the killing of the deceased victim by staging an accidental drowning within the swimming pool of a rental property," a Miami-Dade sheriff's homicide detective wrote in an affidavit obtained by The Associated Press.

But her lawyer, Richard Cooper of Miami, said he and Gupta cooperated with authorities by telling their account of what happened and were surprised when the first-degree murder charge was announced. The doctor, he said, is a victim of a terrible tragedy. "No one thought in a million years that she would be charged with murder," Cooper said in an interview Thursday.