NEW DELHI, Feb 4: Three minor girls all below 16 were found dead in Ghaziabad’s Sun City complex in the wee hours of Wednesday. A senior Ghaziabad police officer said the incident happened at midnight after the children told their mother that they were stepping out of their rooms to fetch water.
The police received information around 2:15 a.m. and, on reaching the spot, found that the girls had sustained fatal injuries. They were rushed by an ambulance to a hospital in Loni, where doctors declared them dead on arrival.
According to the police, the family had five siblings — four sisters and a brother — and the father, Chetan Kumar, had married twice. All family members, including the two wives Sujata and Heena lived together.
The case of three sisters’ deaths after falling from a ninth floor apartment has sent investigators down a rabbit hole. On Wednesday the father of the three girls told reporters that the children were playing a Korean game that made them do some tasks, and the last task was suicide.
By evening, the police, however, ruled out such a game was a factor at all. The three sisters binged on Korean shows on their mother or father’s mobile phones, whichever was available to them, the police said. While the heavy influence of deeply emotional Korean dramas can’t be ruled out as a factor, the police said the Ghaziabad family had other problems, the biggest of them debt.
The girls’ father, Chetan Kumar, a stock trader, carried a debt burden of Rs 2 crore, the police said. The girls did not have mobile phones because their father had sold them to pay the electricity bill, the police said, adding he also threatened the children he would marry them off.
Last week, he stopped giving his mobile phone to his three little daughters – Nishika, 16; Prachi, 14, and Pakhi, 12. The three girls, deeply influenced by Korean dramas, possibly felt offended by their father’s action, the police said.
Chetan Kumar has two wives; the second is the sister of his first wife. He has a son and a daughter from his first wife, and three daughters from his second wife. His first marriage had already completed 17 years when he married his wife’s younger sister.
The police, after questioning Chetan Kumar, said the family’s financial situation was bad. Apart from selling his daughters’ mobile phones to pay the power bill, he did not send the girls to school even after the COVID-19 pandemic subsided. The reason for this, the police said, was the huge debt burden. He never bothered to send the children to school again.
As per initial investigation, the police suspect a mix of all the factors, from mobile phone addiction to impressionable minds getting influenced by emotional roller-coaster Korean dramas, and made worse by the Rs 2 crore debt, may have pushed the three girls to desperation strong enough to jump off their ninth floor flat.
Chetan Kumar’s 14-year-old son from his first wife is mentally challenged. For the family, caring for the boy became another burden in addition to having no money, the police said. The family moved to a two-bedroom flat in a high-rise apartment complex in Ghaziabad three years ago, when the COVID-19 pandemic was on the wane. At 2 am on Wednesday, some residents heard what they thought was the loud sound that comes from objects hitting concrete.
The apartment complex woke up. There was chaos, a resident said. Arun Singh, who lives in an adjacent flat, said he was at his balcony when he saw the three girls at that late hour. He said one of the girls, likely the eldest, tried to walk to the edge. The two other girls tried to pull her back, Singh said.
The face of the girl believed to be the eldest was turned toward the room, and her back was facing outwards, the eyewitness said. The youngest girl clung on to her eldest sister’s waist, while the third girl held her hand; then all three fell to the ground, Singh said. “We immediately called an ambulance. It came an hour later,” he said.
The police said the girls’ room door was locked from inside. The police had to break it down. They said they found what seemed like poetic lines and dialogues from movies. Several photos of the family members were kept arranged in a circle. The police also picked up an eight-page pocket notebook from the room. Written on the notebook was a message to the parents to read the diary “because it is all true.”
Another item recovered from the room was a mobile phone whose wallpaper was a photo of the three girls. They had given themselves Korean names and written them on the digital wallpaper. The girls’ father told the police he lived in northeast Delhi’s Khajoori Khas before moving to Ghaziabad.
Though the police do not strongly suspect the girls died while doing tasks from a creepy game, the case has parallels with the infamous ‘Blue Whale challenge’ that was believed to have encouraged a 14-year-old boy in Mumbai to die by suicide in 2017.
(Manas Dasgupta)