Featured Image Credit: Rachakonda Police
Topics: Health, India, World News, Mental Health
Emily Brown
A mother and father who are both blind found they had been living with the body of their deceased son for four days with no idea what had happened.
Kaluva Ramana, 60, and his 65-year-old wife, Shantikumari, lived with their 32-year-old son at their home in Nagole, India, where he helped care for them.
According to a police investigation cited by ap7am, the three family members lived in a rented home together, but last week the son, Pramod, stopped responding to his parents.
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Police learned Kaluva and Shantikumari had attempted to call out to their son for him to bring them food and water, but were only met with silence.
The couple didn't hear from their son for four days, but it wasn't until neighbors noticed something strange about the home that police became aware of what had happened.
On Tuesday (October 29), neighbors began to smell something foul coming from the home Pramod shared with his parents.
They alerted the police, who arrived at the scene and found the two parents in a semi-conscious state. Elsewhere in the property, they found the body of Pramod, who had sadly passed away.
Police believe the son, who is said to have struggled with alcoholism, died in his sleep.
The smell emanating from the home was likely the result of the son's decomposition, which begins around four minutes after a person dies, according to the website Aftermath.
Decomposition follows four stages; autolysis, bloat, active decay, and skeletonization.
Autolysis begins immediately after death, when excess carbon dioxide in the body causes membranes in cells to rupture and release enzymes, which begin eating the cells from the inside out. Small blisters then begin to appear on the surface of the skin and rupture.
After he was found, Pramod's body was sent to Osmania Hospital for an autopsy to shed more light on his cause of death, according to a police official cited by ap7am.
Surya Nayak, Circle Inspector at Nagole police station, said: ''We suspect that Pramod died in his sleep. The exact cause of death would be known only after the post-mortem examination."
Meanwhile, Shantikumari and Kaluva, a retired government employee, were rescued from the home and given food and water.
Officer Nayak suggested neighbors may not have heard the pair calling out in the days after their son's death due to the fact their voices were weak and quiet.
The couple's older son, Pradeep, who lives in another part of the city, was informed of the situation and has since taken his parents into his care.