New Delhi, Hem Shankar, who was mowed down by a speeding car early Saturday in west Delhi’s Subhash Nagar, was working the night shifts for a few extra thousand rupees to prop up his poverty-stricken family.
Hem’s mother is inconsolable with grief. She said she lost the only man in the family who put food on the table after losing her husband in 2015.
“They dragged him away,” she said in a voice hoary with grief. “I just want justice for him.”
“I have no one left in this world except him. He ran the entire household. Who will look after us now? First, my husband was gone, now my son too,” she told PTI.
Called Rohit by his kin and friends, the 25-year-old started working as a rider four years ago. He would get ₹3,000 to ₹4,000 a month for working at night.
“He used to tell me, ‘Mummy, I’ll make you a queen one day. I’ll fix everything,'” his mother said.
According to police, a car allegedly rammed into Hem Shankar’s scooter from behind around 3 am near the Subhash Nagar Metro station. Visuals from the scene showed a black car with its front hood crumpled, windshield shattered, and deflated airbags.
“Usually, he would leave for work around 6 pm and return by 5 in the morning. He worked all night. Yesterday, he left around 8.30 pm,” his mother said.
“When the accident happened, one of his friends came to inform me. My son always told me not to open the door at night, but his friend kept knocking and said, ‘Aunty, please come, Rohit has been hurt.’ He didn’t tell me that my son had died,” she recalled, her voice breaking.
She fainted when she saw her son’s body, his one leg severed in the crash.
Family members said Hem had recently purchased the electric scooter on loan.
“He had borrowed around ₹20,000. The scooter cost him about ₹40,000. He used some of his savings and borrowed the rest,” Hem’s brother-in-law, Surendra Kumar, told PTI.
He alleged that the car was speeding at around 120 to 150 km per hour and that the driver and another man in the vehicle appeared to be intoxicated.
“As soon as the airbags deployed and those boys stepped out, they tried to run away. But there’s a petrol pump right in front, a few people from there rushed to the spot, and two of them caught the boys,” Kumar said.
The police said that the car driver, Mohit Kumar, 27, a resident of Najafgarh who works as an MCD contractor, was taken into custody, and his car was seized.
Relatives alleged that there were nine to 10 pending traffic challans against the driver, most of them for speeding.
Kumar said the family lives in a single-room house in west Delhi. Hem was the middle child among three brothers, his elder brother, Devendra, 28, and younger brother, Samar, who studies in class 6, live with their mother.
After their father died in 2015, their mother worked as a domestic worker to raise them.
“She started developing cataract and had trouble continuing work. She also has high blood pressure,” Kumar said, adding, “Hem got her cataract surgery done a few years ago. Since then, she stayed home, and Hem took full responsibility for the household.”
Kumar added that Hem’s elder brother is also facing financial troubles after a failed photography business.
“He had taken some loans for the business, but it didn’t work out. Since most of the money came from relatives, Hem took on the responsibility of repaying the debt,” he said.
“They weren’t financially stable, so Hem couldn’t complete his graduation. He finished school and started working soon after,” Kumar said.
“A precious child,” he loved travelling, especially to religious places, he said.
“He recently went on the Jagannath Yatra and had earlier visited Badrinath and Kedarnath.
Suman, a cousin of Hem, expressed anger and helplessness at the incident and blamed reckless and drunk driving for destroying their family. “Look at how these boys drive after drinking,” she said.
“We raise our children with such care, hoping they will go out to work and build a life. But these people, drunk and driving recklessly, just run them over and leave. They don’t realise they are destroying the light of someone’s home … They escape the police and the legal system, and we are left with no justice at all,” she said.
Suman also alleged that neither the police nor the company Hem worked for had contacted the family since the accident.
Hem’s brother-in-law, who is an advocate, said that representatives from the quick commerce company had reached out to the family regarding compensation.
This article was generated from an automated news agency feed without modifications to text.
