BENGALURU: Had he been able to hear his wife alerting him about the falling skeletal structure of the under-construction Metro pillar 218 on the Outer Ring Road in HBR Layout, he could have stopped and prevented the deaths of her and his two-and-a-half-year-old son Vihaan. But that was not to be.
Ironically, the helmet that is meant to be a protective gear for riders and mandated by the authorities, indirectly proved to be a hindrance in preventing their deaths. 33-year-old, grief-stricken Lohith V Sulakhe, husband of the deceased Tejaswini and father of the toddler Vihaan -- whose lives were snuffed out, told The New Indian Express that his full-face helmet prevented him from hearing his wife’s screaming alerts even as they were approaching the collapsing 16.5-metre-tall skeletal structure weighing about 40 tonnes.
Lohith, Tejaswini, Vihaan and his twin sister Vismita were riding on a two-wheeler to Manyata Tech Park, where Tejaswini worked as a software engineer and where the children’s pre-school was located, when the fatal accident occurred.
The bereaved husband said, “I saw the pillar first crashing into a roadside tree and by the time I could react it was too late. My daughter Vismita and I escaped miraculously.”
‘Woman stranger cared for daughter who was in shock’
“But my wife and son came under the pillar. Passersby helped me pull them out and shift them to Altius Hospital nearby,” Lohith said. While his wife was unconscious, Vihaan was struggling to breathe even as Lohith held him and ran towards the hospital, while a woman, a complete stranger, took charge of little Vismita, who was in a state of shock.
“I ran with my son and the hospital’s security guard took my son from me and rushed inside the hospital. My son was struggling to take in breaths, but my wife was unconscious. Another woman in the crowd was holding on to my daughter when I was attending to my injured wife and son,” he said, adding that his daughter was doing fine. “She does not know that her mother and brother are no more,” he said.
Lohith, a civil engineer with a private firm in Vijayanagar, recalled that the traffic on the ring road was not as heavy as on other days when the accident occurred. He said, “Vehicles were moving without any traffic snarls. I could not see the pillar falling as it first fell on the tree and the tree blocked my vision. If the traffic was like the other days, casualties would have been higher.” Lohith said that he cannot forget that it was BMRCL’s negligence that claimed the life of his wife and son.
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