E-Paper
A teenage crush that led to stalking, hazing, suicide and the arrest of 5 collegians
The family of the student has demanded the harshest punishment for the 6 people involved-- including 3 of his classmates at a college at Tokawade, 95 km from Mumbai-- who had lured the deceased to a farmhouse, hazed him before stripping him and filming him
MUMBAI: The Murbad police on Tuesday recovered the phone and seized the video which was used to blackmail a 17-year-old class XII student leading to his death by suicide on February 23rd.
The family of the student has demanded the harshest punishment for the 6 people involved-- including 3 of his classmates at a college at Tokawade, 95 km from Mumbai-- who had lured the deceased to a farmhouse, hazed him before stripping him and filming him.
According to the statement of one of the accused, the deceased had developed a crush on one of his classmates and he began messaging her on Instagram from an anonymous account. The girl got afraid after the messages revealed that her stalker knew all her whereabouts and her daily routine. He would also send her videos of songs without ever revealing his face. The girl complained about the harassment to her friend Manoj Shinde, 22, who studies in the same college.
Instead of approaching the police, Shinde told his mates that they must investigate the identity of the anonymous boy. In one of the videos that the deceased had sent, a classmate, put to work by Shinde, noticed footwear in the corner of the video that matched that of the deceased. They also checked the wall and the farm land visible in the video and landed up at the deceased’s home at Tokawade which belonged to his maternal uncle, and with whom he stayed. Having confirmed his identity, they decided to teach him a lesson.
On February 21st, his 3 classmates stopped him just as he emerged after completing the English paper, and insisted that he take them to his house for tea. En route, they were joined by two of their seniors, Manoj Shinde, 22 and Preshit Pawar, 22. After they had had tea, they insisted that the boy accompany them for a small party, and assured him that they would drop him home within an hour.
According to Murbad police, they went on two bikes to a farm house, 6 kms away, where Manoj Shinde’s brother, Babu Shinde, 31, worked as a caretaker. Reading out from the suicide note left b they took the y the deceased, police sub inspector S Pawar revealed that they forced the deceased to consume alcohol on the pretext of partying, and when he resisted they began beating him up. The caretaker of the farmhouse then asked them to leave. Subsequently, they took the deceased to a hil nearby where they forced him to strip and began filming him. The police say the recovered video shows the naked boy begging for mercy and apologising.
The accused dropped the deceased back to his uncle’s house at 9.30 pm. The following morning, he left the house to go to his parents’ home at Murbad without informing his uncle. But when he reached home, his father scolded him for having come home in the middle of his Board exams. The following morning the family found the boy missing, and eventually found that he had jumped to his death in the village well. But it was only on February 24th that that the boy’s younger brother found the picture of a suicide note from his phone. The grieving family, which had until then been berating itself for being harsh with the boy, was furious and they confronted each of the accused and the took them to the police station to lodge a complaint, said his younger brother. However, this act of taking the accused boys to the police complaint has led to a counter-complaint of kidnapping against the deceased’s family, filed at the Tokawade police station.
Pramod Babar, senior inspector at Murbad said the investigations were on. Three of the 5b accused were minors and had already got bail on account of their ongoing Board exams while the caretaker of the farmhouse and the 2 seniors had been remanded to police custody until March 2nd. “We have the video, the suicide note and the confession of the minor boys about what transpired that day,” said Babar. The investigations are still on, he added, and that the police had yet to question the girl whose original complaint set off this chain of events.
