Jain suffered an injury to the right side of his head behind the ear, said investigators, when the van braked hard. According to the Borivali police, the bleeding boy was lifted out of the van and left outside his building on the road. The 23-year-old driver of the Matador van, Vinay Kumar Jaiswal, and vehicle owner Bhavini Madani (32) were arrested late on Thursday.

The matter was initially recorded as an “offence against an unidentified vehicle” until late Wednesday, with the driver, caretaker and owner of the vehicle being detained. A full day of questioning, statements of witnesses at the spot, video clips from the neighbourhood security camera and the statement of a five-year-old girl who is dropped home by the same van finally led the police to arrest the duo. The two were charged under various sections of the Indian Penal Code and the Motor Vehicles Act for rash driving, culpable homicide not amounting to murder, causing death by negligence, not having followed the duty of a driver in case of an accident, etc. Madani is in the van everyday, as caretaker.

“We questioned the driver and the owner for hours after they were detained. The crucial development took place when one of the boy’s co-passengers, a five-year-old girl, told us the driver had hit the brake, which caused the vehicle to jump, which led to his injury. With this information we questioned the two again and they admitted that the boy was injured while he was inside the vehicle. At the gate, they just left him lying down before they sped away, without informing anyone,” said Police Sub-Inspector Prakash Pawar, the investigating officer.

It was a domestic help from the locality who saw the boy in a “pool of blood” as she was leaving a building.

The driver told the police that he hit the brakes a few yards from the building, at a spot where he turned off the main road into the lane on a steep slope towards the Akash Ganga building in Gorai.

According to Pawar, the Matador was a “run-down model” with no headlights. “The papers were not in order. The condition of the vehicle was not fit for children as there were pointed surfaces, flat rexin seats over scratched metal surfaces and without any handles or support bars for the children to rest,” he said. “The sound of the engine is completely unbearable with the engine’s heat in the interior. The vehicle is now in police custody and we are awaiting a report from the transport authority. The vehicle is, at best, scrap on wheels, not fit for the road.”

Jain, a Junior KG student of Vivekananda School, had left home at noon on Wednesday in the same van. The school had shut early after news spread about the probable arrest of MNS chief Raj Thackeray.