Lakshya Mishra was twenty-one, a second-year B.Tech student at Manipal Academy of Higher Education in Bengaluru, and by every account his parents have given since, in good spirits when he called them on the night of April 6, 2026. Hours later, in the early morning of April 7, he fell from the ninth floor of Hostel HB-4. His body, his father says, did not show the trauma one would expect from a fall of that height. There was little blood at the scene. The room was reportedly cleaned with a master key before any forensic team arrived. The university's public response was silence.
This piece reconstructs the timeline as closely as the available record allows: the final call home at 10 p.m., reported CCTV footage placing a group of students in the corridor between 10 and 11 p.m., a solitary sighting at 1 a.m., and an official time of fall at 3:15 a.m. — a gap of roughly two hours that nobody in an official capacity has yet explained. It sets out the family's specific, on-record objections: the narrowness of the window relative to the account given, the condition of the body, the ₹16,000 left untouched in his account, and the invocation of Section 204 of the Indian Penal Code — destruction of evidence — over the alleged early cleaning of the room.
It also documents what came after: a reportedly discouraged student vigil, rumours about the student's academic standing that his family disputes, a viral appeal from his father — "Kya mujhe sach jaanne ka bhi haq nahi hai?" ("Do I not even have the right to know the truth?") — and the political pressure, including from Jharkhand minister Deepika Pandey Singh, that eventually led to an FIR and the questioning of faculty and students by Karnataka police.
Nothing in this account is presented as settled fact beyond what has been stated on the record by the family or reported by police action. What is settled is this: months after his death, the Mishra family had still not received his post-mortem report. This piece exists because that shouldn't be true, and because journalism's job, in a case like this, is to keep asking the question until someone in authority has to answer it.
Read the complete investigation on Twenty & Thinking's original publication. Anyone with information relevant to this case is encouraged to come forward.