NewIndpress
Chennai, Nov 21: Twenty-Eight weeks pregnant, seriously bruised and nursing a severe brain injury, 23-year-old Samlin Jenita was flown to Chennai from the US on Sunday November 18 night in a special air ambulance.
Waiting for her at the airport was her family, who got the first inkling of what Jenita was going through when a complete stranger of Pakistani origin called them up from a hospital in Illinois saying she was admitted there and that they better hurry and take her back.
The family says the Pakistani, Sardar M Inamullah, a pathologist at the Lake Forest Hospital in Illinois, was the first to take note that something was amiss when Jenita was picked up on July 31 from a highway in Yadkin County 77 by a police patrol and brought to the hospital in a state of coma, with multiple bone fractures.
A family friend of Jenita’s husband Christy Danius informed her family in Tiruchy the next day.
While the husband claims Jenita suffered the injuries in a car accident, her family says she was being harassed by Danius - a software professional deputed to the US - and his family for dowry ever since they got married little more than a year ago. And that, on July 31, Jenita was pushed out of a running car by them.
Two weeks ago, when she was finally able to speak, Jenita alleged the same at the hospital, says her father A Sebastian, who went to the US to get her back. It had been three months since the “accident”.
All this time, says Sebastian, it was Inamullah who took care of Jenita as her in-laws deserted her. After one month of seeing her suffering, he managed to find her address and other details and called up her family in Tiruchy.
While Sebastian has accused Jenita’s in-laws of “deliberately attempting to murder her” and added that she had hinted at this in her letters, Danius denies the charges.
In an e-mail to this website's newspaper, he says Jenita got injured when his car met with an accident while trying to avoid a collision with another vehicle. He claims his car rolled over, leaving Jenita and his sister, Leema Pillai (34), critically hurt.
Danius claims that he too suffered injuries, along with his parents, Michael and Chellam Xavier. On the basis of Danius’s testimony, the authorities in the US only filed an accident case.
In his e-mail, Danius gives a link to journalnow.com, carrying a news report about two women being flown to the Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Centre in Winston Salem with critical injuries. According to Danius, his sister broke her skull and suffered multiple fractures in her pelvis.
“She still uses a walker,” he adds. Danius also claims that it was he who helped the hospital authorities contact Sebastian and questions why Jenita’s father didn’t make the charges before a magistrate, when he signed the change of guardianship in the US.
Sebastian says Jenita’s marriage with Danius had been a nightmare almost right from the start. After an arranged match in August 2006, the two stayed in India till March 2007, when Danius was deputed to the US.
Jenita, apart from Danius’s mother and sister moved to stay with him. They first stayed in Ohio and later shifted to Greenville in South Carolina.
It was then, Sebastian told reporters, that the harassment for dowry began, with Jenita writing them an e-mail alleging the same. However, the father didn’t realise matters would come to such a head till Inamullah’s call.
Before he left for the US in September, Sebastian filed a case of dowry harassment at the Palakkarai police station in Tiruchy.
“We are yet to receive a copy of the FIR as the police say that it can be given only if both the parties are present,” says Sebastian.
Jenita herself was taken from the airport straight to Mehta’s Hospital in the city on Sunday night, and she will be kept there as she recovers from her physical injuries and emotional trauma.