In terrace fall, Tamil Nadu man smashes roof, lands on woman, child

CHENNAI: A 30-year-old man plunged 25 feet to his death from the

terrace

of a two-storey house on Saiva Muthiah Street in Royapettah on Wednesday night, crashing through the

asbestos

roof of a neighbour’s first-floor house, impaling himself in the neck on a rusted iron beam and injuring a sleeping woman and her toddler son.

Dinesh Kumar, a house painter, was

drunk

at the time, police said. He appeared to have lost his balance while sitting on the 2-foot-high parapet wall of the terrace of his brother’s house where the pair had been drinking, investigators said.

“They had dinner together on the terrace before Dinesh’s brother announced around 11.30 pm that he was going to bed,” an investigating officer said.

“Dinesh, who stayed back to smoke a cigarette, appears to have accidentally fallen off the terrace and landed on the asbestos-sheet roof the next door,” he said. “The impact shattered a rectangular section of the roof and snapped at least two of the rusted iron beams on which it rested.”

With part of one rusted beam piercing his neck, Dinesh landed on Jayanthi, 25, and her one-year-old son,

Sarathi

, who were sleeping on the floor, the officer said. The woman and child sustained minor injuries, but Dinesh died instantly when the rusted iron beam pierced his neck.

“Shards of the broken roof left Jayanthi bleeding from the head and left hand, and Sarathi with an injury to the head,” he said. “They received treatment at a private hospital. Jayanthi’s husband Natesh, sleeping on a cot alongside his wife and child, was not hurt.”

A neighbour, Sunitha, told police she heard a loud sound. “We rushed to the house, thinking that an LPG cylinder had exploded,” she said.