Reckless driving by a 27-year-old claimed three lives after he rammed his car into a pillar near Kengeri on Thursday night, police said. Two others were injured.
Sachin Shetty, who was at the wheel, was a native of Udupi, and running Lakshmi Juice Centre in Kengeri Satellite Town. Shetty, his employee Devaraju (30) of Tamil Nadu, and Amanulla Khan (27), a mechanic, died on the spot. Syed Saleem (28) and Syed Habeeb (25), both welders, were critically injured and hospitalised. They were all residents of Kengeri Satellite Town.
Police said Shetty borrowed his friend Pradeep’s car to visit his sister-in-law who was admitted to a hospital in Kengeri, with his friends. After dinner at a dhaba near Kumbalgod, they neared the NICE Road junction on Mysore Road, where he lost control of the vehicle. He rammed into a divider, hit a pillar and landed on the other side of the road. A truck dragged the car for a distance before coming to a halt. “The bodies were mutilated,” police said.
Shetty’s father Raghuram Shetty said, “He had completed BCom and was working in a hotel in Kolhapur. He has been running the juice centre for three years and we thought he had settled down in life. But now, tragedy has struck us.”
His brother Nitin Shetty, who also runs a juice centre in Kumbalgod, said, “People were talking about the accident but I didn’t know Sachin was in the car. Sachin was not a good driver.” Police are awaiting the postmortem report to know whether Shetty was drunk.