Cisco car driver beaten to death on phone theft charge

A man working at Cisco as a car driver was beaten to death allegedly by fellow drinkers at a bar, who accused him of stealing a mobile phone.

On Wednesday, Prasad V, from Jyothi Nagar, Nagarabhavi, borrowed Rs 500 from his wife and went to Wine Ocean Bar and Restaurant, Nagarabhavi, to have a drink.

At the bar, he sat next to five fellow drinkers, one of whom had kept his phone for charging. The phone was later found to be missing. The men suspected Prasad and started questioning him. He denied the allegation, but the men didn’t believe him and took to a room near a skywalk on the Outer Ring Road.

Around 8.30 pm, one of the men rang up Prasad’s wife Sukanya and asked her to come over to their place. When she arrived, she was told that Prasad had stolen the phone and asked that she get it from him as there were many important files on it.

They said they could lose Rs 2 lakh if the SIM card was lost and asked her to pay up. One of the men then beat up Prasad in her presence. Prasad swore by his wife and five-year-old son that he didn’t steal the phone. Sukanya pleaded with the men to spare her husband, saying he had drunk too much. She also asked them to let her and Prasad go home and promised to bring him back in the morning. The men refused to let Prasad go with her and instead sent her home in an auto.

At 10.36 pm, Sukanya got a phone call that her husband had passed out and she was asked to take him home.

She rushed to the room and found only her husband there. She tried to wake him up, but he didn’t respond. She called an ambulance and took him to hospital, where doctors declared him dead on arrival. An officer from the Chandra Layout police station said the doctors who conducted the post-mortem on Prasad had concluded that he had died of a severe head injury and that his skull was ruptured.

The police later arrested one of the suspects, named Subhash, and are looking for the others. “We are investigating the exact motive. Was it was really the phone theft or something else?” the officer said.