Dombivli social workers wrongly booked for theft, quit the noble work for good

Sagar Maru and Navin Maru

The desire to help those who tested positive during the pandemic landed two Dombivli youth in trouble when they were booked for a theft at a house they had sanitised. However, it later came to light that the husband of the woman who worked as a house help was behind the crime. While the real culprit has been arrested, the duo - Navin Maru and Sagar Maru - has decided not to do any more social work.

The incident took place on April 19 after the duo sanitised Hiren Gogri's house at Navneet Nagar in Dombivli. Later in the day, Gogri found 11 tola of gold ornaments missing. He lodged a complaint with Manpada police and named the duo as suspects.

Following the complaint, police officers booked both Navin and Sagar and called them to the police station several times for interrogation. Cops conducted search operations at their houses and took their fingerprints.

After the police did not find the stolen gold ornaments at their house, they started looking for a different angle. The Kalyan Crime Branch launched a parallel probe and found that Hitesh Chheda, the maid's husband, had stolen the jewellery.

Speaking to mid-day, Navin said, "During the pandemic we helped many people and were sanitising the places of people who tested positive for COVID-19. We also received many awards and appreciation for this. However, we stopped doing social work after this incident as we suffered a lot despite being wrongly booked."

Sagar said, "We took the risk to help the people by sanitising their houses. On the day of the incident, we left after we sanitised the house. However, we were wrongly booked and had to face many difficulties. Police officers treated us like criminals. The episode was so bad that we even stopped going out for a few months after that."

Senior Inspector Suresh Dabre of Manpada police station said, "The complainant had named the youths as suspects so we interrogated them. We took their fingerprints to check with the ones we got from Gogri's house. As we did not find any evidence against the two, we did not arrest them. We were only following procedure and conducting a probe."