Sometimes, to give peace to the living, the dead would have to be disturbed, says Madras High Court
Justice V. Lakshminarayanan orders exhumation of a body for DNA profiling and confirms it to be that of the son of a mourning couple before the court
On October 14, 2026, the Madras High Court heard a case where a grieving couple awaited the DNA profiling results of their son's exhumed body. The couple's hope was dashed when the judge revealed the test confirmed the body was indeed their son, who was studying at the National Institute of Technology (NIT) in Rourkela. The parents, hailing from Erode and now residing in Chennai, had been informed of their son's death in a road accident in Odisha on February 28, 2026.
However, the postmortem report did not mention the removal of their son's wisdom teeth or injuries sustained in a cricket accident in January 2025. The judge acknowledged the difficulty of informing parents about the identity of their deceased child and emphasized that sometimes, to grant peace to the living, the dead might need to be disturbed.
After the exhumation and DNA extraction, the Regional Forensic Sciences Laboratory in Chennai reported back, providing the parents with a sense of closure and allowing them to communicate the findings to authorities in the United States, as their son was an American citizen pursuing his engineering degree at NIT Rourkela through the Direct Admission of Students Abroad (DASA) scheme.
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