A 24-year-old woman is suspected to have accidentally killed her grandmother before taking her own life in western Bengaluru, police said.
The circumstances of how Kottigepalya resident Mamatha ended up killing her 70-year-old maternal grandmother Jayamma in the latter’s house at Maruthi Nagar 17th Cross, near Jnanabharathi, aren’t clear. Going by the circumstantial evidence, police believe it was an accident and surmise that Mamatha decided to kill herself after realising what she had done.
The deaths were discovered by Mamatha’s husband, Manjunath, who came to check on her as she wasn’t answering phone calls on Thursday evening.
Police suspect that the incident occurred hours earlier.
On Sunday, Mamatha had gone to her parental house in Mandya to attend a wedding scheduled for Monday but had to return to Bengaluru as she started menstruating.
On Thursday, sometime before noon, she spoke to her brother Chethan by phone but didn’t answer any other phone call afterwards. Chethan and her mother Manjula got worried. Chethan called up the neighbours to check on both Mamatha and Jayamma. He also asked Manjunath to rush to the house.
When Manjunath arrived at the house, he was perplexed to find that it was locked from the inside but nobody was answering the doorbell. Suspecting something fishy, he got the door broken open. What he saw was unbelievable. In a bedroom, Jayamma was lying dead on the floor with bloodstains all around while Mamatha was hanging. He called the police.
An examination showed Jayamma was hit with a blunt object on the face and the head, causing profuse bleeding and eventual death. Police initially suspected she had fallen to her death because there was no reason to believe Mamatha had killed her. But doctors who did the post-mortem ruled that she had been beaten to death with a blunt object.
Police now surmise that the women had quarrelled over some issue, and Mamatha hit the old woman in the heat of the moment. Seeing Jayamma bleed profusely, she may have tried to revive her but didn’t succeed. Seeing Jayamma dead, Mamatha got frightened and, in a moment of despair, hanged herself.
A senior police officer who examined the crime scene said it didn’t look like Mamatha had the intention to kill her grandmother.
Mamatha and Manjunath were married for two years and had a three-and-a-half-month-old baby which died recently. Mamatha is said to have been depressed since.
Jnanabarathi police have registered a case of murder and unnatural death.
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