THIS newspaper yesterday reported that, in the wee hours of Monday morning the lives of Theresa Rozario, 12 years, and her sister Clarissa Rozario, 14 years, of 65 Robb and King Streets, Georgetown, were snuffed out like so much incinerated garbage after their home was destroyed by an early-morning fire. They were reduced to “charred remains.”Their father Randolph Thomas, 63 years, is hospitalised with burns about the body. It was reported that the two children from the St. John’s College and Guyana Trust College remained trapped inside, while their father jumped to safety.
Reportedly, the property at the junction of Robb and King Streets has long been a source of contention between the now hospitalised man, and another gentleman whose name was given as “Buddy.”
In 2010 another fire, suspected to be the work of arsonists – as was this one– threatened the lives of the two girls, along with another sibling, at the same location. It is believed that this tragedy evolved from a series of foregoing events, including confrontations and threats issued by a person who claimed ownership of the property.
The mother of the children, Rosemary Rozario, said that she and the father of her children were not communicating with each other. Moreover, the children were kept away from her by the man and his relatives.
The grieving mother told this newspaper that she was at home when she got the call about the fire from her eldest son. The woman said that she hurriedly left her Guyhoc Park home and rushed down to the scene where she saw firefighters battling to put the blaze out.
The woman said she knew that her children were trapped in the building, since she did not see them or their father when she arrived on the scene: One could only imagine the agony of this woman, especially when witnesses to the tragedy related to her, the anguish in the young voices torturously crying out their pain as the fire consumed their living bodies, until those voices petered out when their lives were finally extinguished.
Women are abused in a multiplicity of ways; and children are often used as weapons to hurt their mothers, as in this instance; when a mother was deliberately deprived of her two youngest daughters, only to receive the agonising news of their most cruel death on a fateful Monday morning.
An attempt was allegedly made to burn the building with the children inside in 2010, and there were reported threats to their lives subsequent to this earlier suspected arson of the building; yet the father reportedly refused to relinquish possession of the disputed property to its legal owner and kept the children in that building, fully aware of the latent threat to their lives; yet, because of his antagonism to the children’s mother, he reportedly refused to allow them to live in safety with her; thereby contributing in no small measure to their tragic fate and untimely end in the most cruel way.
If indeed the man who claimed legal ownership of the property is indeed responsible for the conflagration that consumed two budding young lives, full of promise, then no punishment that could be meted out to him by man could ever be enough, because the value of material things can never equate – not even remotely, the value of lives.
Greed for wealth and power, as well as lust and envy have, throughout the ages, motivated humans to act in drastically inhumane ways; and whether as individuals, or whether as “leaders” of political parties hellbent on achieving self-aggrandizement at multiple levels, the tragic outcomes of Machiavellian actions and inflammatory rhetoric have rippled in the existential dynamics of the human race for eons – with catastrophic consequences most often eventuating in limitless destruction when evil prevails.