A playful three-year-old girl toddled into the driveway of an apartment complex at Kasavanahalli in Bengaluru, only to be fatally run over by an SUV.
The child, Arbina, is the daughter of a Nepalese couple, Jog Jathar and Anita. Jathar is a security guard at the Samrudhi Apartment Owners’ Court, where they live in a ground-floor accommodation.
The incident occurred on 9 December. The girl sat on the sloped driveway and the SUV driver ran her over while leaving the complex.
He claimed he was unaware of the girl sitting there or his vehicle mowing her down until the police challenged him with the visuals from a nearby CCTV.
Her parents, searching for her, found her writhing in pain in a pool of blood. The couple thought she had fallen from the nearby gate and rushed her to a private hospital.
Multiple fractures
The doctors referred her to the Sanjay Gandhi Children’s Hospital, where the medical staff suspected internal injuries and asked the couple to rush the child to NIMHANS. She died en route.
At NIMHANS, the doctors found her shoulder bones fractured. A postmortem examination revealed further multiple fractures and grievous internal injuries, commonly seen in road accident victims.
“The baby had sustained massive internal injuries, and the doctors suspected that it was probably a case of a vehicle running over her and not an accidental fall as claimed by her parents,” a senior police officer said.
“The hospital alerted the jurisdictional police, who in turn, informed the Bellandur police. A medico-legal case was registered, and the police recorded the doctors’ statements,” he added.
Investigators visited the apartment complex. However, they could not pinpoint the exact cause of the child’s fatal injuries.
Two days later, the police noticed a CCTV camera installed at a house opposite the apartment complex.
“Though there was some wiring problem with the circuit, the recorder was functioning, and it had captured the incident,” a senior police officer at Bellandur told South First.
Driver booked
While going through the footage, the police found a man — later identified as Suman C Keshava Das, a resident of the same apartment complex — walking down the driveway and opening the gate. He then returned to his vehicle, an XUV 700 bearing the registration number, KA-04-NB-3564. The child was then not on the driveway.
After about two minutes, Das started the vehicle. Meanwhile, Arbina had come onto the driveway and sat there. The man, without noticing the girl on the downward slope, ran the vehicle over the child and drove away, unaware of the accident to the girl.
The police have booked Das for causing death by negligence (Indian Penal Code 304-A). The case will be transferred to the Bellandur traffic police, the officer said.