The first man died on the night of June 6, 2012, under the unfinished flyover beside the district police office in Kollam, on the Kerala coast. He was about sixty-five, and he was asleep when someone brought a large stone down on his head. The next night Appukuttan Achary was killed the same way on the verandah of a shop. By August five people were dead, all of them pavement and hutment dwellers, all killed at night with stones or other blunt objects while they slept.
The police did not have to look far. The method matched the record of a local man, Navas, known as Motta Navas, born in 1966, who had been charged twice before with killing people who slept in the open. In 1996 he was arrested for the murder of a man named Rajasekaran at Mundakkal, bludgeoned while sleeping outdoors. He was held for four years and acquitted because there were no witnesses. In 2007 he was arrested for the murder of Shamir at Karikode, another street sleeper killed the same way, and that time he was convicted. He was released in 2011.
He used drugs, and his habits were regular. He went to sleep around eight in the evening, woke near midnight and went out walking through the city. Night patrols saw him on the streets during the months of the killings. When he was picked up he behaved as though he were mentally ill, was admitted to hospital on that basis, and was let go. The killings went on.
A team led by Circle Inspector V. Sugathan arrested him at Nehru Park at the beginning of November 2012. The accounts give the date as either the first or the second of the month.
He was convicted of murder and is serving life imprisonment at the Poojappura central jail in Thiruvananthapuram. The available sources do not give the date of the conviction or say how many of the 2012 deaths it covers.
The figure of seven counts the five deaths of 2012 with the two earlier cases. One of those earlier cases ended in acquittal, so no more than six of the seven have been proved against him in court.
Every one of the dead was sleeping in the open or in a shelter built against somebody else's wall. People have lived that way on Indian city roadways for generations, largely unseen by everyone else. Nobody was watching over them in the night, and a man with two previous prosecutions for killing people exactly like them could be seen by police patrols and sent on his way.