A sense of uneasiness settled over Express Avenue, after 23-year-old D. Shanmugam, a software engineer committed suicide by throwing himself from the third floor of the shopping mall.
Even as they narrated the incident, many of the eye-witnesses appeared to be in state of shock.
“I was relaxing outside my shop on the second floor after lunch when I saw him trying to put his leg outside the steel handle of an escalator. Before I could alert anyone, he jumped. Next, I heard a loud noise downstairs,” said D. Subham, salesman, Navkar Computers.
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“None of the mall officials came to his rescue. For at least 15 minutes, he was lying unattended. I saw his legs twitching. Instead of helping him, they were focused on dispersing the crowd, who watched on helplessly,” said K. Maglin, a resident of Bangalore. Along with a few other shoppers, Maglin shifted the victim to an autorickshaw and took him to the Royapettah General Hospital.
The police recovered a shopping bag with two Dairy Milk chocolates and a purse from the victim. The police also got his mobile phone, which had only one contact number, that of his father’s.
The police believe that before Shanmugam jumped, he might have deleted all the numbers except his father’s to ensure that the information regarding his suicide reached his family. A native of Sindupondurai in Tirunelveli district, Shanmugam (23), had been working as system analyst at CTS in Thoraipakkam for the last nine months.
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“We informed the victim’s father, R. Deivanayagam, who is a senior engineer at a wind farm in Kaiyatharu, Tirunelveli. We will study the calls made and received by him after getting call details from the service provider,” said assistant commissioner of police (Triplicane), M. Peer Mohammed.
Police have already studied the CCTV footage, which showed him walking to and fro in the vicinity of Escape cinemas just before he took the fatal plunge. Another frame clearly depicted him placing his leg on the right side of the steel handle at the top edge of the escalator and jumping from there.
The complex has a total of 160 CCTV cameras including 30 rotating ones. Each floor in the mall has at least ten such cameras.
In a late evening development, a friend of Shanmugam’s approached the police and showed them a message in which the victim had expressed an intention of suicide.