– 2 in custody, reputed husband on the run
By Andrew Carmichael
Gomatie Ramsingh, also called ‘Fazila’, of Number 58 Village, Corentyne (Region Six, East Berbice/Corentyne) reportedly died after having been badly beaten by her reputed husband on Tuesday last; but two persons have been taken into custody as police probe her death.
This publication has been made to understand that the beating the 34-year-old was administered had left her partially paralysed, but she was kept at home for three days after that incident before being taken to the Skeldon Hospital on Thursday evening, where she was treated and transferred to the New Amsterdam Hospital on Friday. Her deplorable condition occasioned her referral to the Georgetown Public Hospital, where she died on Sunday evening.
Before her demise, she reportedly told her relatives that her 29-year-old husband Adesh Malu, also called ‘Curry Cow’, had brutalised her. Her last words were recorded on video, detailing that she had been beaten with an iron rod and dragged by her hair down the stairs and around the yard. She had also alleged that her husband had kicked and stamped on her stomach as she lay helpless on the ground. According to the now dead woman, she had taken away an illegal herb from her husband, and this had greatly upset him.
Lying on the hospital bed being recorded by video, the woman detailed that she was in severe pain; and that for days after the beating, she had been denied access to a telephone to call for assistance. During those days, she said, she lay on the floor of their Number 58 Village home stark naked, and was allowed to see only neighbours who believed the story that she had fallen from the landing of the home.
Harrinauth Ramsingh, the now dead woman’s brother, told Guyana Times that he had received a telephone call requesting that he visit the Skeldon Hospital, where he encountered his sister lying on a bed in obvious pain.
“Then the doctor said that she is in a critical condition, she cannot feel anything from the waist down; she is paralysed, she cannot feel anymore,” the distraught brother told this newspaper.
He said that when he asked his sister what had happened, she initially did not provide any information; but after several relatives had asked her to confide in them, the woman told them she had been beaten, and did not fall from the landing, as was initially stated.
Ramsingh, a peer educator, said a neighbour had told his sister to say that she had fallen, in an effort to prevent Malu from getting into ‘trouble’.
“Since they start living home together, he (had been) very abusive to her. Is not one time he hit her; it’s several times. She just take that and she come by us, and the next day she gone back with him,” Ramsingh explained.
He noted that on the day before Mother’s Day, his sister had gone to their home — situated in the same village — alleging that she had again been beaten, and vowing to end the relationship and never return to the man who was five years her junior. But after one night of staying away, she returned to her abusive partner.
It has been learnt that a knife and pieces of bloody clothing belonging to the now dead woman had been lodged at the Number 51 Police Station following reports of violence meted out to her last year.
By noon on Monday, two persons were taken into custody as the police intensified their investigations. Reports are that the suspect had packed a bag with clothing, and was leaving the area when the bag was taken away from him; but he reportedly fled into the backdam. Up to press time, police in ‘B’ Division were on the hunt for the suspect.
