He filed a police complaint to protect his daughter. Then they hacked him to death.

A 45-year-old farmer was hacked to death in Tiruttani of Tiruvallur district on Sunday, October 4 — his crime, according to the police, was approaching the police. The victim, Yuvaraj of Periyar Nagar in Tiruttani, had lodged a complaint with the Tiruttani police against a youth from the same locality for persistently harassing his minor daughter. A senior Tiruvallur district police official said the youth, identified as Sanjay Lawrence, was enraged by the complaint. Along with a friend who remains unidentified, he attacked Yuvaraj and hacked him to death. Police have arrested one of the accused; the hunt is on for the second. It is the sequence that should alarm the state. The harassment of a minor girl went on "persistently" — the victim's own complaint says so. A father did what every citizen is told to do: he went to the police. And the answer, from the harassers, was a retaliatory murder. Whether the police acted on the complaint before the killing is a question the Tiruttani police will now have to answer. It is the familiar impunity loop: complaint filed, no visible protection, swift retaliation. For every Yuvaraj who dares to complain, hundreds of families watch and learn the lesson — that in this Tamil Nadu, approaching the state for protection can be a death sentence. The TVK government, which came to power promising a new kind of governance, must now explain why a father cannot protect his daughter even with the police on his side — and what it will do so that the next complaint does not end at a funeral. The minor daughter at the centre of this horror is left without her father. The accused, identified and named, is in custody; the accomplice remains unidentified and free. The investigation, police say, is ongoing.