By IANS
New York : A man was produced in court Sunday on charge of killing an Indian woman in a hit-and-run case last week.
Robert Fowler, 57, pleaded not guilty to leaving the scene of the accident. Nina Sharma, 49, was struck and killed Friday night as she stood at the end of her driveway at her house in Long Island in New York.
Fowler who was arrested Saturday was ordered to furnish a bail of $100,000 bond or $50,000 cash by the First District Court in Hempstead, News Day reported.
Fowler was also previously convicted of drunken driving.
Investigators said that given the time lapse between the crash and the arrest they were not sure whether alcohol played a role.
"We do believe he had knowledge he struck this woman," said Michael Fleming, Homicide Squad commander.
Nina Sharma, a mother of three, decided to go for an after dinner walk Friday with her husband. When she stepped outside, Nina asked her husband Raj to take the garbage bins from the side of the house and stood in the driveway waiting for him.
Raj, 45, remembers seeing a grey van hitting Nina and throwing her almost 65 feet down the street. Nina was pronounced dead at Nassau University Medical Centre.
The couple had returned home from an evening meeting in Manhattan, where they finalised the lease for a place for their wholesale garments business.
Nina was born in Bangkok and had come to the US 10 years ago with her husband. They lived in Flushing, Queens, till last year, when they moved to their two-storey house in the upmarket East Meadow in Long Island.