FIFTY-ONE-YEAR-OLD Roderick Stevens of Mahdia, Region 8, is currently warded at the Georgetown Public Hospital where he is nursing injuries to the left ear, eye and internal head injuries, after being dealt a severe ‘jumbie’ lash (an ambush) on the ear with a bottle.He was struck from behind and is therefore unable to ascertain who had attacked him. However, he recalls that on the evening of February, he and his wife, Madrina Thomas, had gone to meet with his uncle at the popular ‘Cevon’s shop’ at Princeville, Mahdia.

While there, he recalled seeing a ‘douglah’ (mixed race) young man whom he had never seen in the area before, looking at him. According to Stevens, the man was ‘high’, (intoxicated). But he said he paid the man no mind, since he was just there to collect some money from his uncle on whose mining claim he had worked earlier.
Around midnight, he said, he and his wife left the shop and set out for home. But on the roadway he encountered a cousin who said she would accompany them, but had to go back to the shop to collect her torchlight. It was while he and his wife were waiting out in the dark for her, that someone crept up and lashed him on the left side of his head.
“I was waiting and I only see somebody from a dark spot, come up and lash me, and I fall,” the injured man said. As Stevens lay unconscious, his wife and cousin sought help and took him to hospital. He remained at Mahdia Hospital while being treated for a week and was discharged on February 24.
But the next morning he discovered that he was bleeding from the inner ear. “All the dressing soak,” he declared. He was taken back to hospital and on that same day was evacuated to the Georgetown Public Hospital, where he learnt that the inner ear had burst and so he needed surgery.
On March 2, after being treated at the GPH, Stevens was discharged and sent to the Amerindian Hostel on Princes Street, but while there, the ear started bleeding heavily again and by March 8 he had to be readmitted to the GPH.
However, he remains warded at the institution, and although the head and face are still badly swollen, the bleeding had subsided.
Stevens said that while he was in hospital, detectives came to take a statement from him and mentioned that someone is in custody at Mahdia, in connection with his wounding.