Navas was born in 1966 in Kollam, in Kerala. He used drugs, slept in the early evening, and went out into the city in the middle of the night.
The count of seven in this roster covers sixteen years and three separate proceedings, and it is worth setting out plainly. 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, there being no witnesses. In 2007 he was arrested for the murder of a man named Shamir at Karikode, another street sleeper killed the same way, and that time he was convicted; he was released in 2011.
Between June and August 2012 five more people were killed in Kollam. The first, a man of about sixty-five, was hit on the head with a large stone on the night of June 6 while sleeping under the unfinished flyover by the district police office. The second, Appukuttan Achary, was killed the following night on the verandah of a shop. All of them were pavement and hutment dwellers, killed with stones or other blunt objects while asleep at night.
The investigation turned to him after the second killing, because the method matched his record exactly. Night patrols saw him out in the city during the period. He behaved as though he were mentally ill, was briefly admitted to hospital on that basis, and was released. And the killings continued. He was arrested at Nehru Park at the beginning of November 2012 by a team led by Circle Inspector V. Sugathan; the accounts give the date as either the first or the second of the month.
He has since been convicted of murder and is serving life imprisonment at the Poojappura central jail in Thiruvananthapuram. No accessible source gives the date of the conviction, so this entry records the outcome without a date rather than continuing to describe him as awaiting trial, which is what the roster said and which was the position in 2012.
Of the seven deaths, one ended in an acquittal, so no more than six are covered by any conviction.
What the case is about is who the victims were. Every one of them was sleeping in the open or in a shelter built against somebody else's wall. People have lived that way on Indian city streets for generations and are, as the accessible writing on this case puts it, invisible to most. Nobody missed them in the night, nobody was watching, and a man with two previous prosecutions for killing people exactly like them could be seen by police patrols and waved on.