NOIDA: A newly surfaced video has added a chilling final chapter to the death of 27-year-old software engineer Yuvraj Mehta, revealing how close he came to being saved — and how helplessly time slipped away.
The clip, shot from the edge of a vast, water-filled excavation in Noida’s Sector 150, shows near-total darkness pierced only by a thin, trembling beam of light.
That light was Yuvraj’s phone torch — switched on as he stood trapped in the middle of the pond, desperately signalling that he was still alive, but no one could reach him.
For nearly 90 minutes, Yuvraj fought the water, the cold, and the fog.
A fight against sinking timeShortly after midnight, Yuvraj’s Grand Vitara smashed through a broken boundary wall and plunged into a nearly 30-foot-deep pit dug for a commercial project near ATS Le Grandiose. The excavation had no barricades, reflectors or warning lights and was rendered virtually invisible by dense winter fog.
Unable to swim, Yuvraj somehow escaped the vehicle as it filled with water. He climbed onto the roof as the SUV slowly sank beneath him. From there, he called his father, shared his live location on WhatsApp, and began flashing his phone’s torch — again and again — hoping someone would see.
Those who gathered at the edge of the pit could hear him.
“We could hear his screams clearly,” said an eyewitness. “But all we could see was that faint ray of light. Nothing else.”
On Tuesday evening, authorities finally recovered the Grand Vitara driven by 27-year-old software engineer Yuvraj Mehta — the vehicle that had veered off the road and plunged into the water-filled excavation amid dense fog in the early hours of Saturday.
A crane slowly hauled the grey SUV out of the pit in Noida’s Sector 150, lifting a car choked with weeds and sludge from nearly 20 feet of water. The images of the recovered vehicle, still bearing the marks of prolonged submersion, starkly underlined what residents have long alleged — that the unbarricaded construction pit had been left exposed for months, turning a routine late-night drive into a fatal trap.
‘Save me, papa’Within minutes, Yuvraj’s father Raj Mehta, a retired SBI director who lives barely a kilometre away, reached the spot. He could hear his son’s voice cutting through the fog.
“He kept shouting, ‘Save me, papa,’” Raj recalled. “I could hear him for almost an hour. Each time his voice became weaker.”
The video shows rescuers throwing ropes into the darkness, shining searchlights, and attempting to estimate where the light was coming from — but the beam drifted, dimmed, disappeared, then reappeared. The water was too deep. The pit too wide. The fog too thick.
At one point, a passerby jumped into the freezing water and searched blindly for nearly half an hour, only to surface empty-handed.
Rescue that couldn’t reachPolice reached around 12.15am. Fire services followed. The State Disaster Response Force arrived next but lacked equipment for such depth. The National Disaster Response Force was called in from Ghaziabad, over 40 km away.
Cranes, ladders, ropes and makeshift boats were tried. None could reach beyond 25 metres. The pit was deeper.
Officials later said iron rods jutting out inside the trench made it too dangerous for responders to jump in. Visibility, they said, was “near zero”.
By around 1.30–1.45am, the cries stopped.
The light vanishedYuvraj’s body was recovered at 4.30am, nearly four hours after the crash. The autopsy later confirmed death due to ante-mortem drowning leading to cardiac arrest.
Residents say the excavation had been left open for nearly two years and had already seen a similar accident days earlier — with no corrective action taken. In winter fog, locals said, the pit turns into a “death trap”.
Following the incident, police registered an FIR against two builders — MZ Wishtown Planners Pvt Ltd and Lotus Greens Construction Pvt Ltd — under sections related to culpable homicide, death by negligence, and acts endangering life. The role of the Noida Authority is also under scrutiny.
‘My son didn’t die by accident’For Raj Mehta, the video is unbearable proof of what he calls an institutional failure.
“My son didn’t die because of an accident,” he said. “He died because help couldn’t reach him in time. I could hear him. Over a hundred people were there. Still, no one could save him.”
Yuvraj, an employee of Dunnhumby India in Gurgaon and the sole earning member of his family, had lost his mother two years ago. He was returning home on a fog-choked night — just one kilometre away — when his life narrowed to a single beam of light in the dark.
That light, now frozen in video frames, is fast becoming the most haunting symbol of a rescue that came close enough to see — but not close enough to save.