CHENNAI: In the quite Subramaniaswamy Koil Street in West Saidapet, Shanmugasundaram, the alleged murderer of an aged couple in Panaiyur who died in police custody, is remembered as a short-tempered and cantankerous person, always ready to get into a fight with anyone and even prone to beating up people.
Shanmugasundaram, known to the people of the street as Rajan, grew up there in a fairly well off middle class family member and his father, Ramalingam, was a trustee of the Subramaniaswamy temple, from which the street has drawn its name.
The family owns a double-storeyed house, which bears the name ‘R Shanmugasundaram Illam’. He has two younger brothers and the entire family lives in the house.
Shanmugasundaram went to St Mary’s Matriculation Higher Secondary School at the nearby Vanniar Street. Some local people remember him as one having committed petty crimes — like pilferage of cable wires — when he was a boy.
As he grew up into a ‘tall and pot-bellied man with a curly mane’, he tried his hand at a series of business enterprises — first he ran a finance company, then he opened a mobile phone repair shop and after that he even delivered milk packets.
All the business ventures were started with the help of his father, a contractor and operator of sand ferrying lorries, but he could not run them because of his short-temper, the locals recall.
After he got married to an engineering graduate, who worked as a lecturer in a college in the city’s outskirts, he started his real estate business, which led to a sudden prosperity in his life.
Locals found it difficult to comprehend how a man whose several business ventures had bombed, “was suddenly rolling in wealth”. Within a couple of months of becoming a realtor, he purchased a Hyundai Santro car, which raised many eyebrows around his house as the car had a Tirunelveli registration number.
It was in that car that he drove down to Capt Elangovan Chettiar’s house in Panaiyar on Monday evening. From there, he was driven to the police station after being caught with a revolver with which he allegedly killed at the aged couple and injured their daughter-in-law. A few hours later, he died in police custody.