A 33-year-old man jumped to his death from a foot overbridge at Tambaram railway station and was then run over by a long-distance train moments later.
The accident took place around 7.15 a.m. on Sunday. The victim, Sudeep Kumar Jana of West Bengal, died of critical head injuries, sustained when he landed on a narrow pathway connecting the mainline and suburban platforms after he jumped from a height of about 50 feet.
He was then run over by the Pearl City Express that was just pulling into Tambaram railway station from Chengalpattu.
The locomotive pilot of the express train noticed Jana jumping from the overbridge as the train slowed down while approaching the platform.
The body was shifted to the Tambaram Taluk Government Hospital in Chromepet. Jana’s parents, who were in town, were informed of the accident.
Jana, a mechanical engineer, was an employee of Infosys and had been in Chennai for many years. He lived in a rented room on the second floor of a building on Ganesh Nagar Main Road in Mahalakshmi Nagar, East Tambaram.
A fortnight ago, his parents came to stay with him after they learnt their son, the youngest of their three children, had slipped into acute depression.
According to a friend of Jana’s, he had been under tremendous stress lately. For four years, the NIT-Durgapur graduate had shared the house with another software professional. After his roommate got married and vacated the room three months ago, Jana’s problems worsened. To comfort him, his parents came down from West Bengal a fortnight ago, the friend said.
Two men from Krishnagiri and Salem, who live on the first floor of the building where Jana lived, said the techie was an introvert and barely a word was exchanged between them since they moved into the building a few months ago.
After the post-mortem on Sunday, the body was handed over to Jana’s father. The final rites are expected to be performed in the city on Monday.
In recent months, there has been a spate of suicides of young, well-qualified men and women employed in IT companies in the city and suburbs. A majority of techies live in the south and west of Chennai, in close proximity to IT clusters along OMR, GST Road and Mount–Poonamallee Road.
Often, minor altercations with family members, and other domestic problems, leading to stress, are the reasons behind these suicides, the police said.
