Mumbai: The Malad police arrested three persons on Wednesday, after a 26-year-old teacher Jenel Fernandes was killed in a lift mishap at St Mary’s English School in Malad (West), on September 16.
The arrests were made under section 304 (a) of IPC (death due to negligence) following which they were released on bail. The police will now file a chargesheet against them to submit in court.
The arrested included the school’s manager, the private contractor, who was tasked to maintain the lift, and his helper. The police had on September 30 registered a case of death due to negligence against the lift maintenance agency — Classic Elevators — for failing to do its job, which led to the accident.
According to Ravi Adane, senior police inspector of Malad police station, the arrested were: Johnson John (56), the school manager, Sushil Kumar Chowdhary (57), the contractor, and Rajaram Rane (59) the helper from Classic Elevators.
“We arrested the three responsible for the mishap for not maintaining the lift. They were bailed later,” said Adane.
After the case was registered in September, an FIR was filed based on the report submitted by the Department of Energy, a government agency, after it carried out an inspection of the lift.
The report from engineers stated that the wires of the lift had suffered much wear and tear due to which the system of the downward collective lift (which moves in one direction at a time) was damaged.
The police had booked the owner of the Classic Elevators, as their contract with the school mandated maintaining the lifts every 30 days.
“The last maintenance work, according to the company logs, was done in June 2022. The company officials in their statement however said that they had done the maintenance but had not kept a record,” said Adane.
The investigation also revealed that the school’s management was responsible for not insisting on the maintenance.
Fernandes, who worked as an assistant teacher at the school, was just done with her class on the sixth floor at 1pm, on September 16, and took the lift to go to the staff room on the second floor, before going for the next class.
When she called the lift to the sixth floor, someone is likely to have pressed the button from the seventh floor simultaneously; although the door’s sensor was working, due to the wear and tear of the wires before it could close, the lift started moving upward, dragging Fernandes causing her head to get stuck between the two floors.
Police officials said that her cries for help alerted the clearing staff who rushed to her rescue. She was seriously injured and was taken to Lifeline Hospital, where doctors declared her dead before admission.