Couple hang themselves in flat, leave behind infant

Ghaziabad: A young couple were found hanging from ceiling fans in two different rooms of their flat in Indirapuram on Friday morning. When a neighbour entered the house first, she found the couple’s nine-month-old son playing with his toys in the drawing room.
Nikhil Kumar (31), who worked as a sales manager with a private company in Noida, and Pallavi Bhushan (28) had married two years ago and were originally from Patna. They had been staying in a two-bedroom rented flat in Gyan Khand 1 for the past few months.
Police, who are prima facie treating this as a case of suicide, said the couple had used towels to hang themselves from the ceiling. While Nikhil was found hanging in the bedroom, his wife lay dead in the drawing room when the cops entered the flat. There were a few cuts on Pallavi’s left hand — possibly made with a kitchen knife — and blood stains on their son’s clothes.
The police suspect Pallavi might have tried to commit suicide by slashing her wrist initially. The last piece of communication from her phone was a WhatsApp message she had sent to her sister Anjali in Greater Noida around 3.45am. Pallavi had asked her sister to come to their flat around 6am and take their son along with her as he would be alone.
Anjali saw the message around 6.30am. Sensing something was not right, she called on the phones of both Nikhil and Pallavi repeatedly, but did not get any response. Anjali then dialled her friend Megha, who, too, stays in Gyan Khand, and asked her to check if all was well.
When Megha reached the flat, she found the main door open. A little hesitant, she went inside. The first sight that met her eyes was that of Pallavi’s body hanging from the fan. Her son was playing on the drawing room sofa.
Megha called up Anjali and informed her. But she did not have any idea that Nikhil’s body, too, was in the other room. By then, a few neighbours had started to gather around the house.
Police said they received a call about an alleged suicide around 7.30am. A team reached the house soon. “We had just started our search when one of us found the man’s body hanging in the bedroom. Nobody had informed us about the second body. Both of them had used towels to hang themselves,” said Sanjeev Sharma, the SHO of Indirapuram police station.
The cops also found a knife in the kitchen. “It could be that the man committed suicide first. Seeing his body, his wife might have tried to slash her wrist. She had some cut marks on the left wrist. When she couldn’t, she carried her son to the drawing room, put the child to sleep on the sofa and used a towel to hang herself. We have found blood stains on the child’s clothes,” Sharma added.
The police are scanning footage from cameras in the building and nearby areas to check if somebody had entered the flat before Megha arrived.
They are also looking for clues in the couple’s cellphones. The nine-month-old child has been handed over to Pallavi’s sister as Nikhil’s family is yet to arrive from Patna. No complaint has been lodged yet.
Neighbours couldn’t recollect a single instance of Nikhil and Pallavi fighting among themselves. The couple would often play with their son in the park near their building, they said. “The boy was playing with his toys when I went inside the house. I brought him out and handed him over to the cops, who arrived a little later. A few things in the kitchen and drawing lay scattered,” a neighbour said, not wishing to be named.