Close to midnight on Wednesday (July 22), the uncle of a 15-year-old girl in Bengaluru received a frantic call from her. Distraught and panicking, she informed him that her father had died after he was fatally injured by a pair of scissors. On Thursday, the girl was detained by the police. She gave a statement – her 46-year-old alcoholic father was killed following a late night scuffle at their home in a gated community in Mico Layout.
The girl had told her uncle that it happened after 11 pm, as she was trying to study, when her father, in an inebriated state, started playing the piano very loudly.
“It was around 11 pm on Wednesday. He was drunk and was trying to play the piano. The family lives in a respectable gated society in Bengaluru and the neighbours have always complained about the loud noises, arguing and the fighting. So the daughter, who was studying inside, asked him to reduce the volume as she did not want the matter to escalate. He ignored her, which is when she came outside and reduced the volume herself. That angered him and he picked up a knife and tried to attack her. She sustained some injuries as well. She got scared and she picked up a pair of scissors, warning him to back off. However, he was so inebriated that there was a tussle and that is when the scissors pierced into him,” a close relative told TNM.
The girl’s brother ran out to fetch the neighbours, who later reached the spot and called the police.
The man’s family tells TNM that the deceased had a history of alcoholism.
“He was very learned and intelligent. After working for 12 years at an IT major, he quit. Two years in, around 2011, his wife delivered a second child. When the baby was ten days old, the mother died. This was the turning point,” the relative said.
After the wife died, the man’s family stepped in. By then, however, the girl’s father had taken to drinking.
"We thought this was his way of dealing with depression after his wife’s passing,” the relative said. The man’s extended family moved to Bengaluru to help him out, but he was not very happy with the developments.
It was reported that he even forced his older child to drop out of school and began to home school both the kids, she said.
A colleague told TNM that he would ask to be referred to as their trainer and not their father. "He took his older child out of school, saying continuing in school will harm her.
The man’s family made multiple attempts to intervene but were shot down every time, the relative said.
A source told TNM that the child is being kept at a home for girls and is being treated as a child in conflict with the law. A case under Section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder) of the Indian Penal Code has been filed in connection with the man’s death.
A person working closely with the Juvenile Justice Board told TNM, “It seems that she has been remanded without an order. The board should have been told that the child needs to be with her family, she needs to take part in her father’s funeral.”
The girl’s lawyer confirmed that she had not been arrested in the case.
Her nine-year-old brother is staying with another aunt, and has been called for questioning at least thrice till now, the family said.
In their statement to the police, a neighbour of the family wrote that the father had a history of ‘drinking every day and fighting with the children’ and that they have, on several occasions, gone over to the family’s home to sort out their issues. The statement adds that on the night of July 22, around 11.50 pm, the neighbour and her family saw the 9-year-old boy running towards the security room and he told them that his father had died. When they went up to the apartment with the security, they saw the father’s body in the living room, with his shirt soaked in blood.
“His daughter was also in the living room, she looked shocked. We asked her what happened. We also saw that there was a sharp object that was protruding out of his chest where he was stabbed,” the neighbour’s statement to the police reads.
“The girl told us that around 11 pm, she was sitting in the living room and studying, while her father was drunk and was playing the piano very loudly. She told him that she was getting disturbed but he started a fight, yelling and slashing her with sharp objects. She then told us, ‘I got extremely scared and picked up two scissors that are used to cut paper and I was standing with my back to the wall with both those objects in my hand. He threw away the sharp objects in his hand and started slapping me hard. He did not listen to me, he came to hit me further and the sharp objects in my hand ended up stabbing him accidentally. I threw them away. By then, he fell on the floor, he was struggling to breathe and in a few moments passed away’,” the statement filed by the neighbour adds.
The neighbour in the statement has also asked the police to treat the man’s death as accidental, since the daughter had “no intentions of killing or hurting her father,” and that because he was being extremely violent towards her and she was scared that he might harm or even kill her, she had taken those scissors for self defence.
The family says that the two children have suffered enough in their lives and the legal system has to take a compassionate view of what transpired.