UPDATE -- Thomasville, Ga. podiatrist Adam Frasch was booked into the Leon County jail on Wednesday afternoon on charges of interfering with child custody, while deputies continued to investigate the death of his wife Samira, the Tallahassee Democrat reported.
Frasch's attorney, John Leace, said his client doesn't know what happened to his wife and that he had her permission to take the children to his home in Panama City. Leace said Frasch was returning the children the Tallahassee when he was arrested.
Frasch was arrested Saturday at his waterfront home in Panama City Beach as he was packing up his SUV, having strapped his children -- two girls, an infant and toddler -- into their seats. Frasch was seen driving them away from their Tallahassee home on Saturday at 8:30 a.m.
Leon County deputies are waiting for results from the autopsy conducted on Samira Frasch, who was found dead at 11:30 a.m. Saturday in the swimming pool of their upscale house in northeast Leon County.
The former model, a native of Madagascar, had been given sole custody of the girls and the house while the divorce was pending.
(Below--article posted Sunday night)
Podiatrist Adam Frasch was arrested in Panama City on Saturday on charges of interfering with child custody after his wife Samira was found dead in the swimming pool at her home in Tallahassee on Saturday, Tallahassee Democrat andIndyposted.com report.
The couple were separated and were going through a divorce. Samira Frasch, 38, a former French fashion model from Madagascar, had been living in the couple's large northeast Tallahassee home with their two young daughters, 10-month-old Skynaah and 2-year-old Hyra, the Democrat reported.
An alert had been issued on Saturday after detectives learned that Adam Frasch, 46, had been seen driving off with the children on Saturday morning. They were found unharmed and placed in the custody of the Department of Children and Families.
The podiatrist, whose Facebook page says he practices at the South Georgia Family Foot Institute in Thomasville, Ga., has active licenses in both Florida and Georgia, online records show. No discipline is listed in Georgia, but in Florida the Board of Podiatric Medicine in 2012 gave him a reprimand and fined him $1,000 for failing to report that he had pleaded no contest to criminal charges.
Those pleas had involved infractions that occurred years ago, during a prior marriage. Frasch was charged in 2007 with domestic battery, but pleaded no contest to a lesser offense. In 2009, he pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct and resisting an officer without violence. Licensees are supposed to report any such actions to the Department of Health within 30 days, but Frasch did not, records show.
The couple's ongoing divorce was turbulent. Adam Frasch took out domestic-violence injunctions in August and October against his wife, the Democrat reported. Samira Frasch was given the right to live in the couple's house in December.