A young mentally disturbed woman was sitting alone, with a 10-month-old baby on her lap, on a deserted darkened stretch of the East Coast Road, along the kerb, past 10 pm on Monday. She was a sitting duck for anti-social elements and also faced a real threat of being run over by vehicles zipping through the expressway.
Thanks to the timely intervention of two reporters, she was taken to hospital and later reunited with her family that was searching for her since Sunday.
When this reporter and a colleague from a television channel were driving to Cuddalore from Chidambaram, they spotted three men trying to strike a conversation with the woman, at the lonely spot between Mettupalayam and Periyapattu villages.
When they approached her, the men said the she was not responding to their queries and had refused to move away from the road. They claimed that when they tried to forcibly remove her to a safer place, she shuffled back to the road.
The TV reporter then called district collector Rajendra Ratnoo over phone, which led to a posse of police and social workers arriving at the spot.
Chidambaram ASP Durai, a woman SI and two policemen could not elicit nay reply from her. Even the staff of an NGO, who arrived around 11.40 pm could not persuade her.
Finally, she was taken by force and driven to a hospital. Whenever her child was taken from her, she reacted violently, banging her head on the floor, prompting people to return the baby. Even at the hospital, where she was shorn of her matted locks and given glucose intravenously, the woman, later identified as Latha, a trained nurse, did not let others take her child away.
Latha was identified on Tuesday as the wife of Kennedy, a rowdy in Cuddalore, who was murdered in Neyveli last month, after her brother-in-law, Jaikumar, went to lodge a missing person complaint.
Since this reporter had shown the picture to policemen, Jaikumar was directed to the GH. Latha never uttered a word except saying, “you are trying to take my child away.”
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