Two days after the >three teenagers drowned in the Kudlu quarry pit on Friday, the body of the 14-year-old Lokesh surfaced on Sunday morning.
The rescue team, which recovered the bodies of his two friends, Aishwarya (13) and Meghana (13), from the Kudlu quarry pit in which they had drowned, abandoned the search at 10 p.m. on Saturday. The three of them were playing near the quarry and ventured into the water after which Lokesh slipped and drowned. The two girls who tried to help him out of the water also drowned.
The Parappana Agrahara police said that expert swimmers had searched for the body on Saturday and they had even used videocamera detectors to scan the quarry pit but to no avail. The body, however, surfaced on Sunday morning. Lokesh’s uncle, Venkatesh, said that the family and other local residents had gone to the quarry pit around 5 a.m. on Sunday. An hour later, the body surfaced, following which they alerted a police officer who was stationed at the quarry pit.
They later shifted the body to Victoria Hospital where the autopsy was conducted and the body was handed over to the grieving family.
“I don’t want this to happen to any other child ever again and I don’t want anyone to experience what we are going through,” were the words of Lokesh’s mother, Sharada, who had sat through the search operation.
“I wish the quarry pit is closed down immediately,” she added. Lokesh was the eldest son of Sharada, a manual labourer, and Nagaraj, an employee of a garment factory, who have three other children. He was studying in the same government school as did Aishwarya and Meghana. Nagaraj lamented that his son had not gone to school on Friday.
“The children were supposed to go to school, which reopened on Thursday. But we thought we will buy Lokesh a new bag and books and send him on Monday,” he said. Lokesh’s grandmother broke down saying it was impossible to describe the kind of pain that she was suffering on the loss of her eldest grandson.
She said that this was one of the many such incidents of drowning that had occurred in the quarry pit which had remained open even though the quarry work was stopped at least 10 years ago.
