Woman cried out to son for help as husband slashed her throat
When his father Praveen Taneja began thrashing his mother Minakshi at her maternal home on Saturday afternoon, the 10-year-old son thought it was one of the usual bursts of domestic abuse his mother faced frequently. He realised his mother’s life was in danger only when Minakshi began shouting out to him for help.
The boy and his four-year-old brother were on the first floor of their grandparents’ home in south Delhi’s Badarpur when Taneja began the bloody assault on his 30-year-old wife.
The younger boy was asleep at that time.
“When my father attacked my mother, she began shouting to me for help,” the boy told the media. As his younger boy slept soundly, this boy ran down to his mother’s aid.
By the time he reached downstairs where the assault was playing out, his father had already picked up a knife. When the boy tried to intervene, his father allegedly pulled him by his hand and locked him in a room. “I could do nothing from inside,” said the boy who could see the murder take place through a window.
“My father then cut my mother’s throat using a knife. She fell on the floor and wriggled while holding her neck. She could not speak anything after that,” the boy said.
The man then picked up the cooking gas cylinder and repeatedly bludgeoned his wife with it. “He picked up the cylinder and threw it on my mother twice, but she was alive and continued to struggle. The third time, my father hurled it with more force. My mother did not move after that,” said the boy.
As Taneja walked out of the home with the knife in his hands, some neighbours walked in and opened the door to let the boy out. He rushed to his mother to see if she was still breathing, but she had died by then.
Police said the two boys are being counselled. “Both boys are traumatised. One of them witnessed the murder and the other saw his mother being cut and crushed,” said an investigator.
For now, the kids are under the care of their grandparents. “The boys’ mother anyways wanted to leave them in her parents’ custody. She did not want them to witness her husband regularly beat her,” he said.