…living with one sister, marrying another becomes too much for him
A TRIANGULAR love affair, in which a man enjoyed the best of two worlds with two sisters, living under a roof with one, and secretly stealing away to marry the other, on Sunday afternoon ended tragically, with him hanging himself from a jamoon tree at Clay Brick, Number Two Canal, West Bank Demerara. The suicide was witnessed by the sister he married last September.
Dead is Anthony Latchman, 23, of 571 Block ‘B’ Belle West, West Bank Demerara.  He was a labourer employed at a grocery store in the Stabroek Market.
The final episode to his philandering came after a heated confrontation with the elder of the two women whom he married. Previously, they had merely a visiting relationship.
Latchman’s reputed wife Priscilla Persaud, with whom he fathered two sons, Orwin and Javin, four years and two months, yesterday tearfully related the tragedy.
Priscilla recalled that around 14:30hrs on Sunday, she was sitting in a hammock with her baby when her mother-in-law, Ramona Latchman, received a phone call, urging her to “Come quickly,” because Antony had just hanged  himself.
The call came from Priscilla’s older sister, 23-year-old Pinky, who had made her life a living hell, and eventually succeeding in getting Latchman to marry her.  They were reportedly married by a Pandit in September 2011.
The report given by the elder sister, relatives said, was that the hanging happened at Clay Brick, a short distance away from Belle West, where she and Latchman had met briefly so she could hand his cellular phone over to him.
A misunderstanding developed, after she saw him ‘all dressed up’. When she asked where he was heading, he said that he was going to town, then attempted to move off.  Tempers flared and according to Pinky, Latchman assaulted her physically. She said he beat her badly and attempted to tie a bag strap around her neck, but she cried and begged him not to kill her.
The woman claimed that after a few minutes of arguing back and forth, Latchman took the bag strap, placed it about his neck and climbed a jamoon tree from which he hanged himself.
The word went around the two families like ‘wild fire’ and relatives hastened down to the place of the tragedy.
The grieving mother of two recalled that in the initial period of her five years of living with Latchman, everything went well, until her sister’s husband died in July 2011. Soon after, she said, she found out that her reputed husband was having an intimate relationship with her widowed elder sister. When the news broke, both Latchman and his sister-in-law became ashamed, and could not initially deal with the scandal, Priscilla said, and so they both attempted suicide, but neither of them succeeded.
Priscilla said they thought that that was the end of the relationship, but soon after her reputed husband began battering her and even moved out.
Priscilla said that when she was in hospital to get her second baby, she learnt that her reputed husband had secretly married her sister.
Priscilla, with a new born baby, did not go to great lengths to break up the relationship, but summoned Latchman for alimony, demanding that he support their four-year-old son.
Meanwhile, with no home of his own, Latchman was reportedly forced to spend only limited periods with his married wife, because whenever he did so, they had to lodge at a resort and the bills kept going up. He could not live with his married wife, since she was lodging at her parents and they did not approve of him.
And having now to finance his son through the Courts, and make a contribution to his mom’s home, where Priscilla and the children lived with him,  his income was insufficient.  And so it did not take very much for him to end it all, villagers say.
The police are investigating.