Lure of kisses puts teenager in well

KOCHI: A text message from his girlfriend offering him plenty of kisses landed a daring

Romeo

in deep trouble at

Puthencruz

early on Sunday.

The 17-year-old Romeo had sneaked out of his house in his father’s car after his girlfriend, aged 15, offered to kiss him if he met her at her house post-midnight.

The plan of Puthencruz’s Romeo and

Juliet

went wrong when the boy, driving towards the girl’s house, came across a police night patrol around 1.30am.

The boy took an interior road to avoid the patrol, but came across another police party. The teen put the car in reverse, and things went out of control.

The car rammed an electric post, and then came to a halt after crashing into a compound wall. The panicked boy abandoned the vehicle and bolted, scaling compound walls one after the other, until he reached an open space in the compound of a house, police said.

In the darkness, he mistook the protective half-wall of an abandoned well as yet another compound wall, and scaled it.

Meanwhile, the police patrol party, hearing the car crashing, started a search. They, however, did not hear the splash the boy made while falling into the well. After they could not find anything suspicious, the police returned. The boy, though he had fallen into the 50ft water well, was unhurt. He managed to get a foothold on one of its protective rings.

The residents of the house, meanwhile, were unaware of the drama going on in their compound. One of them woke up for his routine jogging and switched on the light around 4am.The boy saw the light and called out for help. “Chetta (big brother), please help me out,” the resident later recalled the voice calling out from the well.

The man informed the police, and the fire and rescue services, who ended the teen’s ordeal.

A senior police officer said both the boy and the girl were students of the same school. While the boy is a Plus-Two student, the girl is two years his junior.

Though the boy was unhurt and returned home, police slapped a fine on his parents for providing the teen an opportunity to

drive without a licence

. The electricity board, too, gave a notice, seeking compensation for the damaged power pole.

Police said the boy was caught at the girl’s house a week ago, and her father had brought the matter to notice of the boy’s parents. His parents scolded him for the week-ago incident, and the boy left home in the car to his grandparent’s house, a few kilometres away.

Though the teen’s grandfather had taken away the car’s key from him, the boy managed to hoodwink the elderly man to get the key back.

Police haven’t registered a case. “We asked both the families to advice the teenagers to concentrate on studies,” the officer said.