A seven-year-old girl who was asleep on the floor inside K.R. Market premises was run over by a vehicle that arrived to unload flowers in the wee hours of Tuesday. The driver abandoned the vehicle and fled from the scene.
Shivanya was part of a group of tribals hailing from Ambur, Vellore district in Tamil Nadu who went around South India selling balloons, earrings, bangles and other children’s toys at temple car festivals. The group that included six adults, including the girl’s parents and two of her siblings, had recently come to the city to sell their wares at the Huskur Madduramma Temple Jathre held between March 24 and 28.
After the festival concluded on Monday evening, the group came to K.R. Market, also a private bus transport hub of the city, to catch a bus back home. However, it was too late and they couldn’t find any buses, forcing them to halt for the night. The group slept on the pavement behind coconut mandi on the premises of the market. Unknown to them, this pavement is also where vehicles laden with flowers come in the wee hours of the day to unload.
Around 3 a.m., a tempo traveller with flowers drove into the premises as usual, but the driver did not see the group sleeping on the pavement as it was also dark and the area is not well lit.
“The driver of the vehicle has applied sudden brakes, but it was too late by then. The seven-year-old girl Shivanya sleeping at the edge of the group next to her mother came under the wheels of the vehicle,” a senior traffic police official said.
Though the girl was immediately rushed to a nearby hospital, she had succumbed by then and was declared “brought dead”. Meanwhile, the driver of the tempo traveller involved in the accident abandoned the vehicle and fled from the spot.
K. R. Market Traffic Police have registered a case against him for causing death due to negligence and are searching for him.
