Like scores of girls of her age, this sixteen-year-old also should have been busy with the ensuing plus two examinations, but was cooling her heels in a government home after being arrested on charges of murdering a three-and-a-half-year-old girl child.
Student of a government school, she had passed class X scoring 389 out of 500 marks (77.8 %) only to drop out from school after joining plus one last year as her mother, a daily wage worker was not keen on her schooling and her step-father too was equally disinterested.
Police said the teenaged girl, while being at home, alone on most of the days, developed a craze for using perfumes and buying new clothes.
As her mother, a farm worker and stepfather could not afford to give her money, she had indulged in petty thefts to end up committing a grave murder offence.
On the fateful day on Tuesday, when she found the neighbour’s child with silver anklets she took the child away and removed the anklets. When the child cried, she dropped the child in a well on the outskirts of R Kavanur village and went to the town to pledge the anklets.
When she returned with Rs. 2,000 after pledging the silver anklets, police caught her and she spilled the beans.
She was produced before the Juvenile Justice Board on Wednesday and taken to be lodged in the Government observation home at Tirunelveli on Thursday, police said.
S. Duraimurugan, District Child Protection Unit (CPU) officer, who interacted with the accused girl, said she confessed to throwing the child into the well after removing the silver anklets and regretted for the act.
She had stolen the anklets to buy new clothes, she told the official. He blamed the girl’s mother for failing to send her to school.
The Child Protection Unit, childline or Child Welfare Committee could have intervened if the head of the school informed one of them after the girl dropped out from school, he opined.
