Chennai: Five days after the murder of Infosys techie Swathi in Nungambakkam railway station, the story emerges of the death of a 70-year-old man, who had swooned and collapsed after seeing the bloody platform where the woman’s dead body had lain unattended for hours. The deceased elder was identified as Aadikesavan, a resident 9th street in Choolaimedu, who ran a lathe shop on Wall Tax Road. His family members suspect he could have died of a heart attack seeing the bloody scene on the platform.
According Kothandaraman, son of the deceased, his sister received a call from a woman at around 9 am saying her father was lying unconscious in Nungambakkam railway station. “The caller had used my father’s mobile phone to call my sister by redialling the last dialled number. My father had earlier called my sister to discuss some plumbing work at home. He usually walks to the station, takes a train towards beach, gets down at Park station and walks to his shop. That was his routine for the last 40 years,” Kothandarama, told this newspaper.
When my sister Vimala reached there after 20 minutes, my father was still lying on the bench at the railway station, which was full of policemen and there was a traffic jam outside on the road. With the help of others, she somehow carried her father outside the station and took him in a vehicle to a private clinic from where he was taken to another hospital in Aminjikarai. The medical team there declared him dead on arrival, added Kothandaraman, who runs his own contract works. The family feels that if somebody had alerted an ambulance and taken Aadikesvan to the hospital quicker, a death could have been prevented.
Kothandaraman, a resident of Mugalivakkam, was in Nungambakkam in connection in his line of work when his sister called him to inform about their father falling unconscious. “I could not reach the Nungambakkam railway station immediately because there were so many police personnel and vehicles jamming the Nelson Manickam Road. They were all there to attend to the murder. But nobody cared for our father,” he added.
