Bangalore: Child Slips to Death from Mother's Arms

Bangalore, Jul 26 (DHNS): It is an eminently avoidable risk for parents to feed their babies standing on the edge of a balcony in a highrise apartment. On Monday morning, this risky way of feeding ended in tragedy for a south Bangalore family.

It was around 8.40 am. Amrutha, a homemaker, had just seen her husband off to office. She started feeding their 18-month-old son Arman. According to available details, the young child was restless and refusing to eat.

The mother then came out of their 9th floor apartment—in Adarsh Rhythm along the Bannergatta Road in JP Nagar —to the floor’s common passage and stood close to the window to feed the child.

What happened next was tragic. She might have calmed the restless child but in the process the plate from which she was feeding the child slipped from his hand. In an attempt to hold on to the plate, the child slipped out of her arms. There were no eye-witness accounts available. The mother was hardly in a position to speak about the tragedy.

From what the police said, the child fell out of the window of the 9th floor corridor to the parapet at a first floor level. The child’s body was smashed beyond recognition. It was instant death. The child was declared brought-dead at a neighbourhood hospital.

Amrutha’s husband Vishal Kashyap, a software engineer at Evaluating Systems, had barely reached his office when he had to return home upon receiving the shocking news.  The couple has a three-and-half-year-old daughter who was inside the apartment at the time of the tragedy.

A security guard at the apartment block, who first saw the body, told Deccan Herald that the child might have slipped through the window and first hit the 8th floor window sun shade (Chejja) and that’s why the direction changed and he fell on the portico/porch. “The head, neck and back were smashed beyond recognition,” he said.

The Kashyaps are said to be originally from Punjab but have settled down in the city. They had moved into the 9th floor flat (Flat No. C-903) a couple of years ago. They are in a state of shock and their relatives in Rajajinagar took them to their house. The autopsy was conducted at KIMS hospital and the body was handed over in the evening.

JP Nagar police said they know only what Amrutha initially told her husband. “She is right now in a state of shock; she has withdrawn into a shell. We are waiting for a detailed account from her as no eye-witness account is available to us,” said police inspector SK Umesh said.

The local police had a tough time entering the residential complex. Hours after the incident, the police team sought permission and entered the area.

Incidentally, two months back a 10th standard student had committed suicide in the same apartment complex.