BANGALORE: Fourteen-year-old schoolgirl Shikha hanged herself on Tuesday evening unable to take the rejection of her Facebook friend Manoj who stopped interacting with her.

Shikha (name changed), a Class IX student, had accepted a friend request from M Manoj Kumar in September this year. The second year BCom student of Seshadripuram College, Yelahanka, who claimed to ride his motorcycle like a Hollywood star and drive like a Formula One racer, charmed the girl.

All this while, her family was in the dark about Shikha’s online romance. Shikha herself had no access to the internet and would visit internet cafes and log on to chat with Manoj. Manoj then invited her to his bachelor pad in Nandini Layout, and when Shikha visited him, forced her into a physical relationship.

He soon began asking Shikha to share her classmates’ details, including their phone numbers and FB accounts, which made her suspicious.

Shikha, who believed her romance would end in marriage, broached the subject, but was shocked when Manoj laughed her off saying he wasn’t serious. “I did everything for fun,” he is believed to have told her and asked her to forget everything. This sent Shikha’s into a depression, and her suicide note reflects on the trauma she underwent.

On Tuesday night, after Shikha’s mother returned from work, she found the house locked, and called her husband. They broke open the door with the help of neighbours and to their horror found their daughter hanging from the ceiling. The suicide note lay on a table nearby.

The family found out that Shikha had played with her little brother and left him at a cousin’s house down the road, returned and locked the house, before ending her life. They told police they weren’t aware of any developments. “She was depressed for some days and we thought she was worried about her studies,” her father told police.

On Wednesday, Mahalakshmi Layout police arrested Manoj Kumar from his Nandini Layout residence and booked him for rape and abetment to suicide.

Her last note

I am depressed as Manoj is avoiding me. It is just two months since we met and fell in love. Everything was fine and I sacrificed everything to him. Even Manoj developed physical relationship with me. But now he says "I did everything for fun" and how can he do that to me? I am ruined and have no interest in life.

