– Family closed business after bandits killed patriarch in 2009

ACCORDING to Shoba Roshan, a chef at a city restaurant, she was asleep in her Peter’s Hall, East Bank Demerara home at about 03:30 hrs on Saturday when five masked, gun-toting men, who had apparently invaded the wrong house, awoke her, her husband and his aunt, demanding to know where “the doctor who live here” was.

She said the men gained entry into the house by prying open a back door at the bottom flat and screwing out the bolts from the grill there. At the backyard, she pointed to a trench which is filled with thick vegetation and a track leading to the bank of the Demerara River. There, a ladder which is used by the Dewans to check their water tank on a trestle was lying across the trench.

Roshan said she does not know that any doctor lives in the street; but the men ransacked the home for approximately half of an hour, all the while asking for “the doctor who lives here”.

Roshan said one of the men hit her husband on his foot while demanding the family’s valuables and the “doctor’s” whereabouts. She said the men took away four mobile phones, two of which belongs to her husband’s place of employment, as well as hers. The men also took a small sum of money from the family.

Roshan said the men “leff the house in a mess,” making their escape quietly through the back door.

The young lady said several attempts were made to contact the Providence Police Station, but the phones rang out repeatedly. A friend, however, managed to call the police at Eve Leary and alert the lawmen. Officers then directed her to the police at Providence.

She said she was disappointed that since the family reported the matter to the police, the investigators were yet to visit the home, even as she spoke with this publication at about midday on Saturday.

Family patriarch Dewan Roshan had succumbed to gunshot injuries he sustained at the hands of bandits while closing his business place one Saturday afternoon in June 2009. Two men attacked the 49-year-old man and shot him in the region of his abdomen. The family’s grocery has since been closed.