ANOTHER Mother’s Day has come and gone, leaving behind many mothers whose tears are drowning the landscape of their motherhood.
These are mothers whose children have been crushed on Guyana’s highways by drunkards; mothers whose daughters have been butchered like meat in a slaughterhouse by brutal spouses/boyfriends, and even strangers who could not accept rejection; mothers who are held to ransom, trapped in destructive relationships and marriages for the sake of their children; mothers whose children seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth. And in many instances these mothers are voiceless, despite the many institutions and organizations that receive massive funding and assistance in a multiplicity of ways to address their plight.
Laws are passed, but there is little or no enforcement. There are many self-important dignitaries and officials who walk the bureaucratic stairways to stand on platforms and speak authoritatively on women’s issues, but whose words translate to zilch, because, when it comes to sustained and effective action to deal with real problems that women face on a daily basis, their concerns vanish like a magician’s puff of smoke. They are too busy doing official things in front of still and video cameras to bother with the real-life women whom they ostensibly represent.
Today, we will explore briefly the world of some women; and some women who mothered children, and seek to mother children not their own; who await, seemingly in vain, for justice for their loved ones.
Sheema Mangar, a former Demerara Bank employee, was on 11th September, 2010 run over and killed by a thief who grabbed her cell-phone as she awaited transportation home after work.
Today, nearly three years on, the police have no credible answers to provide the grieving family, despite the time and the area where Sheema was killed having slow vehicular traffic and hundreds of pedestrian traffic – hence many potential witnesses.
Sandra Ali was extremely poor; and was not quite well. She also was brutally killed in her home at West Ruimveldt, opposite the primary school; and to this day, no-one can provide answers for her gruesome death.
Neesa Lalita Gopaul’s own mother is accused of murdering her for the property her father left his two underage daughters.
The maternal relatives, in whose care authorities placed the two girls after alleged abuses, rejected them, claiming that the $8,000 per week they were being provided with for the children was insufficient, and returned the children to their abusive situation, which resulted in 16-year-old Neesa being subsequently murdered. Today, they are allowed to keep the little sister, who was five at the time of her sister’s death, despite pleas by the affluent family members of her dead (and presumed murdered) father. After all, the child is now the sole heiress to her father’s considerable property and other assets.
Leeloutie ‘Pinky’ Seeram, a mother of two, was chopped by her drunken husband on the back of her head. She also sustained other injuries. She died that day after years of abuse. Pinky’s mother, Lata ‘Cheryl’ Inderdeo, 52, was also chopped on her right shoulder and left palm as she attempted to save her daughter. Cheryl survived the attack, albeit with lifelong scars and pain. The children are now orphans.
Babita Sarjou, the 28-year-old mother of a four-year-old boy, disappeared after leaving her workplace, having made plans with her estranged husband to take her son to the Diwali motorcade. The husband had, among other abusive acts, allegedly posted nude photos of Babita around her place of work, and had been charged as a consequence.
There was also a custody hearing for their son pending. In spite of all these facts, he is still free, and has custody of the child whom he refuses to allow Babita’s mother, Champa Seonarine, to see; so she has not only effectively lost her daughter, but her adored grandchild as well. Babita has never re-surfaced.
Victorine Ifill, on September 11, 2009, lost her two-storey concrete house at Sophia. The home she had provided her children was totally destroyed by fire when Ifill’s ex-husband “allegedly kicked down the door to the house and set it on fire, using cooking gas and kerosene.” She lost everything she owned in the inferno.
Stanley, aka Denis Griffith, the alleged arsonist, was apprehended after a year and then freed by the police. Ifill has had to rebuild her life from scratch.
Felicity Holder, an 11-year-old schoolgirl, was murdered by strangulation. Her body was found in the bathroom of her great-aunt and the latter’s reputed husband in 1997. The autopsy Dr. Simon performed revealed that someone had raped and strangled the child. That person had then tried to cover up the actual cause of death by staging a hanging.
Oscar Lamazon, the reputed husband of the child’s great-aunt, was charged and sentenced to death for the crime; but in 2004, he was freed by Justice Jainarayan Singh, who ruled that the prosecution had failed to produce sufficient evidence for a conviction, based on the fact that although sperm samples had been taken by Dr. Simon during the autopsy and had been handed over to the police, the prosecution had presented no forensic evidence to show that the accused had had sex with the victim.
Dr. Simon was told that the samples had never left Guyana, after all. He said,
“Some senior police official said that ‘Guyana poor and we don’t have the money to waste on that type of thing…No specimens were sent to any laboratory, so we could not have the DNA evidence to present in court…Through DNA testing, we would have been able to say who killed her.
Those samples would have shown if the man had sex with her, and he could not have doubted it.”
Beatrice Bobb, a thirteen-year-old who lived in a tiny shack in an alley, was in1994 gang-raped and strangled by way of a plastic bag stuffed down her throat. She was found on the playfield of the North Ruimveldt Multilateral School.
Kathy Ann Stewart, a 14-year-old schoolgirl, was in 1974 found dead in an alleyway in Tucville. The autopsy proved that she had been sexually assaulted, and that her neck was broken. A Tucville resident who lived near the alleyway was detained and questioned, but then released. Her murder remains unsolved.
Monica Reece’s battered body was, on Good Friday night in 1993, thrown out of a pickup on Main Street. Forensic samples were taken from the 19-year-old security guard’s body, and from the vehicles of several suspects, but her case also has grown cold.
Luciana Bhagwandin, a 22-year-old trainee teacher, was stabbed multiple times, and her body dumped near Back Street, Harlem on the West Coast Demerara on January 10, 2010. Her suspected killer is a man who identified himself to Luciana as Jerry Jagroop
Viya and Shiva Persaud, two and four years old respectively, were drowned by their own father, Chunilall Persaud, on July 14, 2011 after a domestic dispute. He subsequently hanged himself. The distraught mother, left bereft of her innocent babies, questions why they had to pay for their father’s sins.
Gaitree Narine, 26, of Alliance Road, Timehri, East Bank Essequibo, was hacked to death on April 9, 2011 by her reputed husband, Parmanand Seepersaud, who later succumbed to the poison he had ingested, leaving three children orphaned.
Belika, 10, Daniel, four, and Joy, seven, were mercilessly butchered on October 11, 2011 by their father, John Blanchard, 31, at Sand Road, Soesdyke, East Bank Demerara while their mother was working in the interior as a cook. He was arrested, and has since been charged for the murder of his own children.
On Thursday, 13th March, at the opening ceremony of the three-day annual Police Officers’ Conference, President Donald Ramotar called on police ranks to lift their level of work in efforts to counter crime, as he plugged the need for continuous training to meet the need for skilled ranks.
In a Michelle Outridge report, President Ramotar was quoted as saying: “We have to improve and expand traditional police work, and to modernise it as the theme says; and we have to look at more training continuously. The GPF will have to be able to use more complicated tools, and therefore use science and technology more in crime fighting. That calls for us to improve on the education level and skills in the GPF.”
President Ramotar said further, “We are also trying to enhance the ability of the Force to increase their percentage of convictions, by having stronger evidence, using scientific evidence to go to Court.
“That is why we are spending a sizable amount of money in building a Forensic Laboratory which we hope will help, because so many crimes are left unsolved”. He also acknowledged the need for families of victims to have closure, recalling the Sheema Mangar case.”
Local investigators have lost many cases, either because of ineptitude, or their inability or unwillingness to utilise available forensic evidence to solve crimes.
One wonders if the state-of-the-art $450M forensic laboratory that Government proposes to establish at the University of Guyana would serve its logical purpose in crime-fighting; or if, regardless, the system would continue to fail victims, who may be mere discardable statistics to law enforcers, but who are the children of mothers who perennially grieve for their lost children.
