AGRA: In less than eight hours, six people died in two accidents on the Yamuna and Agra-Lucknow expressways on Thursday.
Delhi-based businessman from Sarita Vihar Shashikant Agarwal, 50, was on his way to his nephew Rupak’s wedding in Jhansi on Thursday morning with his wife Aparna, 48, mother Susheela Devi, 70, and three children — Ishika, 12, Akshita, 8, and toddler Tanush. Around 9.30am, he spoke to his sisters on the phone.
“A while later, we got another call from his number. But it was someone else speaking,” Sushma, a family member said. The person told them Shashikant and his family had been in an accident. Then, they got texts from Akshita — gruesome images of the accident.
They were on the Yamuna Expressway in Mathura when the tyre of the car had burst and it spun out of control. “Another car in which five youngsters from Delhi were travelling rammed into theirs,” Mahavan police station inspector Praveen Mishra told TOI.
Shashikant, Aparna and Susheela died. The couple’s three children were injured and admitted to a private hospital. “We don’t know what will happen to them now,” said Sushma. “Their aunts have reached Mathura. The cremation will probably be held there. They have no one left in Delhi now.”
The five youths in the other car — Ravi Tewari, 24, Manish Tewari, 28, Nilesh, 25, Vishu, 23, and Vijay, 22, — have also been hospitalised. They are all from Delhi’s Karol Bagh.
Hours before this and 170 km away on the Agra-Lucknow Expressway, three others died in an accident. Mukesh Yadav, 25, had just gotten married in Deoria on November 30. On his way back to Gurgaon, where he worked at a pathology lab in Udyog Vihar, he may have fallen asleep at the wheel.
There were four others in the car — his uncle Sagar, 35, who works with a private company in Gurgaon, Sagar’s wife Anu, 30, who ran a beauty parlour, Sagar’s father-in-law Mohan Yadav, 65, Mukesh’s nephew Ram Prakash Yadav, 32, and Sagar’s son Rishabh, 8.
“It was around 2.30am when their car lost control and toppled over the carriageway, falling 12 feet below,” Karhal station house office Shiv Kumar Chauhan told TOI. Mukesh, Anu and Mohan died. Sagar and Rishabh have been admitted to Saifai Medical College in Etawah. Ram Prakash, the only one in a condition to speak, said the funeral will be held in Deoria on Friday.